I've mulled over this, but after a traumatic week or two in stock markets, I've decided that you will most probably be cheered up to hear the litany of woes that affected the Sandison family on their trip to Antigua last week. However, a warning to the few sensitive souls on this list....it is a sorry tale, not for faint hearts and you may find what I have to say upsetting.
Things did not get off to a great start when we discovered on checking in on Saturday morning for our BA flight from Gatwick that our 5 year old daughter, Lottie, was not going to be allowed to come with us. Her passport had expired two weeks earlier. Manfully, I took the blame, a strategy which did me no good whatsoever as I paid for this minor error repeatedly throughout the week once Sophie had rejoined us after depositing Lottie with my parents up in Fife. Oh cruel life. Remarkably things just went downhill from here. A green slime developed around the perimeter of the swimming pool, but only after all three children who did make it out to Antigua had gone down with severe ear infections necessitating various trips to St Johns and copious doses of antibiotics and ear drops. The house turned out not to have mains electricity. The irony, for someone who had covered his carbon emmissions for the flights out so conscientiously, was that we found ourselves living next to a smokey and noisy diesel generator that would not have looked out of place in a suburb of Chongqing. Nevertheless it failed to produce sufficient power to enable us to run the air-conditioners without blowing every fuse in the house. So we slept in 90oF temperatures with windows open open and mosquitos gnawing on every bit of our bodies. Enough already. There was so much more but I can't bear to relate it all.
There was one small moment of humour. Driving Henrietta to the doctor, trundling through the pictureseque village of All Saints, I slowed to negotiate one of the many and enormous holes in the road when a very hip Rastafarian guy peered in through the passenger window and mumbled something at us. I smiled cheerfully at him and responded, though I say it myself, at my casual and suave best " Yo thanks " leaving Hen howling with laughter. It transpired our Rasta friend had said "Lookin' good babe", and presumably he had not been directing his attentions at me.
In similar vein I thought I would attach one of my recent email dialogues with said Hen after I realised that the World Cup semi-final clashed with the performance of Joseph and his blah blah Dreamcoat - not that I think, or really care, for a moment that England will get past the quarterfinals.
From: David Sandison, CLSA [mailto:david.sandison@clsa.com]
Sent: Wed 07/06/2006 09:22
To: Henrietta Sandison
Subject: If England get through to the Semi-finals of the World Cup....
I'm not sure I'll be able to come and watch you in Joseph.......
oh dear daddy how sad you are!!!!!
Oh well......does my face look bovered? I don't imagine that many of you will be doing anything quite as esoteric as me this evening. Celebratory party at parents of a friend of daughter no. 2, Jimmy. The father, who is a Cambridge don at Trinity College, a mathematician and an acknowledged expert in the field of algebraic geometry, has just been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, joining the likes of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. He has previously invited me as his guest at the Audit Dinner at Trinity and so far, I think, I have managed to successfully conceal from him the fact that I only scraped my Maths "O" Level at the third attempt. Attempting to deal with such guile, you lot have no chance.
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