The crew and I meant to spend the day at Hampton Court Palace, but as we were waiting for the ticket office to open I took a phone call that changed my plans.

My younger daughter, ever the Baby of the family, though she is 18, has given me some of the worst moments of my life (lovely creature though she is), and she started very early.  When she was less than a year old she took up that toddler trick I had heard about but never before seen – holding her breath until she went rigid, turned blue and shook as if convulsing, and then holding her breath some more, until her eyes rolled back in her head, and she passed out.

By the time she was two or three I was in danger of being reported to the Social Services for gross neglect.  Onlookers who witnessed this performance (I am telling you, it is scary) shouted Do something!  Call an ambulance!  How can you just sit there?  And I would answer casually, Oh don’t worry, she’ll come round in a minute or two.

The first time she did it, however, I thought she was dead.   I thought something like that today.

I spent much of the day on the telephone.  Everyone agreed there was nothing I could do by returning immediately to Oxford, and in any case the boat would have to be got back to its home mooring somehow.  The crew were very sympathetic, and when they came back from their day at the palace, they urged me to do whatever I thought best, and they would help in any way they could.

By evening the situation was more stable, no one was dead, and it was quite clear that nothing could be gained, for the time being at least, by turning the boat around and heading back.  In fact, after I had discussed the alternatives with the Baby’s father, we agreed that the best plan would be for me to get the boat to London as soon as possible.  There I would be able to catch a fast train to Oxford.

Day 8 statistics: 0 locks and 0 miles, except for the many miles I paced.

Silverbridge (Trollope fans will recognise that as code for The Duchess’s Elder Son) phoned from Seattle just over a week ago.  I was on the boat, where I have recently sorted out internet access, but cell phone reception is a still a little dodgy.

Pangolin is 62 feet long and 6.5 feet wide, and I only get phone reception at either end, with a long dead zone in the middle. Late Sunday evening I was just emerging from the engine room at the back (where I was fussing over my batteries) when the phone sprang into life and registered a missed call. 

I opened the hatch, and standing on the little stern deck, picked up my voice mail.  A quarter moon shone on the canal and on the large, round hay bales in the fields on the opposite side.  The farmhouse’s windows gleamed in the distance, and, from along the tow path, a quarter of a mile away, the lights of the pub beckoned steadily.

I don’t usually make international calls from my cell (because they cost a small fortune) but I had a feeling that I wanted to return this call.  I hadn’t heard from Silverbridge for several weeks.

My son, child who first made me a mother, told me that sometime in the early autumn or late summer he was going to make me a grandmother.  When we finished talking I trundled up the towpath to the pub and shared the news with a batch of people whose last names I don’t know.

Then I played a couple of games of pool.

A long time ago I thought I would feel ambivalent (at best) about becoming a grandmother. When I was a very little girl my friends and I used to play a competitive game about how old our grandmothers were, each of us making more and more extravagant claims until the biggest liar of all shouted, MY GRANDMOTHER IS A HUNDRED.  To be a grandmother was to be old.

A couple of decades later I remember my mother, quite a lot younger than I am now, demanding to know when I was going to make her a grandmother (and complaining that my dog was interfering with the prospect).  I was still surprised that she would want such a thing, except as a deeply abstract idea, far into the future.  My mother wasn’t old; how could it be possible?  How could she want it?

I understand now.  I don’t feel old at all, even though my own grandmother really was a hundred when she died three years ago.

I do feel like someone who, one afternoon at work, might get up from her desk and ask, Anyone fancy a cup of tea? 

And then when several faces (some middle aged) look up and answer (in their British way), Go on, why not?  I might also just be the sort of person who would add, Oh, I forgot to say!  I have some exciting news!

And then, apparently, it would be perfectly natural for the others barely to blink before smiling and suggesting (empty tea cups still expectantly out raised), Could it be that you’re going to be a grandmother?

I’m not sure how I got to be that oh-so-obvious progenitor, but it seems I am. 

Do you think it’s the sensible shoes?

It isn’t quite 12th Night, but as this is getting close to the last time one can decently use the c word until next November, I bring you, “Catching up: Christmas chez Duchess.”

One week before Christmas, The Piper’s Son fetched me from the airport.  I was coming back from a further month’s visit to the US, making 2008 the only year I have spent more than weeks in my native country since 1983.  I was glad to be home (England home) and not thinking of travelling again for awhile.  

A couple of days later I was again at Heathrow Terminal 5 to pick up Elder Daughter and her boyfriend.  Terminal 5 is the brand new state of the art way to fly long haul into London.  Here are the brand new state of the art fountains outside the door:

Inside there are brand new state of the art baggage handling systems that didn’t work at all when T 5 first opened last spring, so they solved the problem by putting all bags, wherever to or from, on a bus to Milan.

They’ve sorted that now, it seems.  Elder Daughter was arriving with boyfriend.  In the distance, through the NO ENTRY doors I spotted a young, bearded man pushing pink suitcases.  I pointed him out to my ex husband, and, a moment later, we watched our daughter, swinging her violin, emerge through the doors.

I don’t have any pictures of that lovely, grubby, travel weary, grown up child whom I had not seen for one long year.  I simply cried and held her and then shook hands with boyfriend, a new acquaintance.  The suitcases, so clean, pink, and Legally Blond when she left for Uganda 15 months earlier were filthy.  Rats’ piss, she said casually.  The violin was the only item of value we sent her away with that hadn’t been stolen, because no one knew what it was or what it was worth.  Oh, guitar?  people would ask.  Yes, she answered.  A very small guitar.

My daughter worked for the VSO, the British version of the Peace Corps, posted to a small NGO, the Peace Education Trust, in the corner where Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo meet.  While she was there she looked after some of the most vulnerable people on the continent — deaf and blind children and HIV/Aids orphans.  Incidentally, she also set up youth volunteering options for much shorter periods — two weeks to several months — so get in touch if you have a young person looking for something worthwhile to do between high school and college, or college and grad school.  My daughter promises me it is safe, though readers of this blog will know I have fretted.

Meanwhile, back to Christmas with newly home Elder Daughter placing the dove that always sits on top of our Christmas tree

I admit it is a haphazard Christmas tree.  There are clothes pin and silver foil angels made by the children, felt snowmen and paper and glue stocking decorations.  Little wooden ornaments sent from Germany and glass ones from America carefully stashed in Granny’s suitcase.  There are unlovely, but loved, plastic ones meant to be hung on low branches, safe from babies, kittens, puppies.

My younger daughter is rather proud of our tree.  Her friends, she says, have Trees with Themes.  Unlike ours.

The Piper’s Son was eager to show me that five years at Fire Lighting School had not been spent in vain.

All the children grumbled when I said we might do without the knitted nativity (a Duchess hand knit original) so I put it on the windowsill as usual.

They never fail to remark on how fat Mary is, compared to poor little Joseph (in green next to her), but I deny this has anything to do either with my inability to knit to gauge or to Joseph’s weakness of character. All women who have just had babies are larger than life, I say, and husbands are naturally subdued.

Over the years the shepherd, poor thing, has lost his lamb and one of the kings has lost his gift. When I am a grandmother, my grandchildren’s parents will know more about fat Marys and I’ll knit up celebratory frankincense, myrhh and a whole stable full of lambs.

The presents were finally wrapped and Santa did come at last.  The cunning disguises in everyone’s stocking were a great hit.

So were the ping pong ball shooting guns (oops not politically correct, but I’m pleading years of a dove topped tree in mitigation)

The Piper’s Son gave us all bean seeds and a potted plant, according to our characters and gardening abilities.  His father got broad beans and a cactus.  I got runner beans and an orchid.  He gave his older sister and her boyfriend climbing beans and an olive tree, his baby sister dwarf beans and a jade plant (the jade plant is nicknamed “money tree” – the Baby has expensive tastes; her friends with themed Christmas trees may provide a hint).

After presents everyone pitched in to Christmas dinner cooking, especially when the cooker (=British stove, not the cook) broke down and dishes had to be shuffled oven to oven.  Everyone, that is except the Ex, who was busy enjoying his Christmas reading

Elder Son normally makes the Christmas pudding (from scratch!) but he was 8000 miles away, so this year’s was a store bought, out of date, emergency item I had picked up a few years earlier in case Elder Son’s plane didn’t arrive in time for heavy duty chef detail.  I shoved it in the cupboard and was too embarrassed to give it to the local old people’s home once it went out of date, but not at all embarrassed to resurrect it this year and serve it up to my family. 

Holly stolen from the neighbours over the road spruced it up nicely.  We did pour flaming brandy over it, but the ensuing excitement, what with the table also catching fire, means the before picture is all I’ve got.

And very nice the pudding was too, even after.

Crumbs!  I haven’t got to Boxing Day or New Year’s Eve at the Rock of Gibraltar pub on the Oxford Canal.  But I think that is all I have energy for, for now.

I’m back in England after a month’s visit to the US.  The Piper’s Son (child no. 3) picked me up in his little red VW with his brand new driving license.  I knew I would miss our hours in the car together while I supervised his practice, but I was sure he would pass his test, scheduled for while I was away.

I had left the little island on a cold, stormy Sunday, fetched by Silverbridge (child no. 1 who lives in the US) and he drove me to the airport early the next morning.  By the time I arrived in England it was Wednesday morning, and I was tired of travelling, and tired.  I began to think children with cars and driving licenses were fine things.  Two down, two to go.

The Piper’s Son is a pretty good driver, and on the way back from Heathrow to Oxford, though I did still give the odd bit of driving advice (I’m not suggesting the advice was odd – I’m speaking Brit, so I am just saying it was miscellaneous and occasional), we mostly just chatted.  I hadn’t seen my son in a month and he was filling me in.

We’ve got a mouse, he said, meaning at his father’s house, where he and his younger sister mainly live. 

Dad set a trap.  It’s a humane trap, he added. We’re not savages.

Later, his father elaborated.  It seems the humane trap has caught a mouse several nights running.  The trap provided an excellent dinner for the mouse, and then in the morning my ex husband released the mouse in the garage, so it would be somewhere warm, of course, leaving it with another snack.  The additional snack was to encourage the mouse to stay in the garage, my ex husband explained.  Meanwhile, in the kitchen, he reset the trap.

My ex husband was still cheerfully wondering whether he might have been catching the same, persistent mouse over and over the night he caught two mice. 

I said where there are two mice there are a lot of mice. 

Also, since I had recently been visiting my father I mentioned that my stepmother likes to feed the birds, but sometimes the food she throws attracts other creatures. 

Besides birds, my stepmother noted, snakes and rats ate the food she put out.  There was an incident with a snake in the basement, and she began to see rats scurry around the back porch.  Soon, the occasional hawk, spotting the snakes and rats, circled, dropping in for the kill. 

Then my stepmother put out leftovers for the hawks. 

While she was telling this story my father interrupted to say that then the Husband said he would kill the Wife if any more Hawks ate any more Rats who were eating Food for any more Birds.  And that put a Stop to it.

Processing allegory is a family skill.

My ex husband considered this for a moment.  He is an economist.  It’s part of his job to think about unintended consequences (economists call them externalities).  He meant to be kind to the mice.  But now he is worried that the food he is putting out for them (to compensate them for being removed from his house) might attract birds.  And birds might attract cats.

And cats eat mice.

The ferry’s been out of service for just over a week.  People who live here (like my mother and her partner) are settling into the routine of staying mainly on island, walking or biking everywhere, chatting to their neighbours.  These three weeks of purdah, when the island is cut off from all vehicle access, is the annual divide that separates the busy, touristy summer from the long, rainy winter.  The sun is still shining, but we know its days are numbered.  The nights are drawing in.

I’ll have returned to England before the car ferry’s back in service, but meanwhile, like a good islander, I’m enjoying the forced privation that keeps me mostly off the mainland.  I’ve baked bread (twice) and (twice) walked – that’s hiked to Yanks, who take these things seriously and have poles to prove it – up the island’s mountain, all of 1000 feet high.

Today, the second time on the mountainside, I met a girl I went to school with 35 years ago and 3000 miles away.  There were 85 kids in my high school class; the population of this island is about 900.  Both of us come from east coast families, and when we were in class together neither of us had ever been west. 

It’s a little weird that we should both turn up here, but not quite as weird as a discovery my mother made when she was first living on the island and introduced to another recent arrival.  As they talked it gradually emerged that they have the same great grandparents, making them second cousins.  Neither my mother nor her long lost cousin have any roots in this part of the world – I think the shared great grandparents were from New York – yet both my mother and her cousin retired to the same tiny, relatively unknown, island in Puget Sound (population then about 800).

If there are any mathematicians out there I would be interested in what the odds against such coincidences might be.

The Baby and I were talking about my father, her grandfather, whom she barely knows. I was trying to remember when she had last seen him, but she was very clear.

The last time I was there, she said emphatically, was when you went to the CIA by accident.

Right. I had almost forgotten that.

I had taken the two younger children, my son the Actor (then about 15) and the Baby (10), on holiday to the USA. Among other places, we went to my father’s house in northern Virginia, partly to visit with him, and partly so I could show these British children some of their American heritage.

One morning I borrowed my father’s car just to drive it as far as the underground – I guess it was about 20 minutes. I wanted to take the kids into Washington DC.

About five minutes down the road I remembered I did not have my driver’s license with me (in England you are not required to carry it when you drive, and because it is large and doesn’t easily fit into a wallet, I usually don’t).

Oh, don’t be silly, Mother, said the Actor. You are not going to get stopped!

A few minutes later I remembered I hadn’t brought the map either, but once again my son took charge. Not a problem, he said, I’ve memorised the directions.

So we carried on. I spent the day dragging the kids to every monument and memorial in the Capital. It was post 9/11. Visits to the White House were suspended and trips up the Washington Monument had to be pre-booked, but otherwise we saw and did pretty much everything a good tourist is meant to do: we trooped up the steps of the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, wandered in the then fairly new sculpture garden at the Roosevelt Memorial, and walked sombrely past the names of the Vietnam dead (which I found deeply moving, and no doubt the children found dull, but they humoured me).

At the end of the day we rode the train back to Virginia and the Actor directed me as we picked up the car and headed toward my father’s house. We were nearly there when the Actor told me to take the next right.

Here? I asked.

I think so, he hesitated, and I turned. The sign, invisible from the main road, said, CIA. Authorized Personnel Only Past This Point.

Oops, said the Actor.

I looked around in a panic. The road was designed with a thick hedge of trees and bushes entirely separating the lane heading towards the CIA from the lane heading away. There were no turns to the right or left and no way to go back.

I had no choice except to carry on and eventually stop in front of a speaker on a post rather like the ones where you order at drive thrus. Only I didn’t think they would be selling me a latte. We were still a long way, I guessed, from any building.

A stern voice asked me to state my business with the CIA.

I said I didn’t have any business. I had taken a wrong turn and just wanted to get back on the main road.

The voice ordered me to continue forward into a parking area, stop in front of the chain link fence and follow the instructions of the officer.

I said, Please can’t I just turn around?

The voice bellowed, Follow the instructions of the officer!

I pulled in and parked.  Through the rear view window I saw a man in combat uniform sporting a machine gun almost as tall as he was saunter towards the car. I rolled down the window and waited for the inevitable question.

Can I see your driver’s license?

I explained that I came from England where it was not necessary to carry the license.

Okay, he said, Can I see your passport then?

I regretted that I did not have my passport with me.

He strolled around to the back of the car and examined the number plate. As he did so the Baby asked, in a whisper, What does the CIA do?

Without hesitation my son answered, They kill people.

The officer returned and said, in some exasperation, Well, can I see some kind of picture ID, please?

I said I thought I must have something… I shuffled wildly through my wallet and in a moment produced the only one with my photograph on it.

Reader, I handed the officer my Bodleian Library card.

A look of real sadness came over his face as he turned it from front to back. Ma’am, he said, I’m trying to help you here.

Well, anyway, things went from bad to worse and the officer pointed out I wasn’t giving him much to go on when I couldn’t find either the registration or insurance documents in the glove compartment. Nevertheless, he finally let us go after running the number plates to see if the address I gave him matched. You’ve got a couple of kids in the car, he said, by way of explanation, but I think it was the Bodley ID.

Back home, my father found the story hilarious. The turn towards his house is right after the CIA turn and it seems it wasn’t the first time that mistake had been made. His new house cleaner had also gone to the CIA by accident, only because she was Hispanic and driving an old beat up car, the disembodied voice directed her to pull into a spot where swords came out of the ground, surrounding the car and creating a cage. She was scared out of her wits. My father laughed until he cried as over and over he threw up his arms to demonstrate just how the swords had come up.

I guess, compared with your average encounter with the CIA, we came off pretty well.

The Baby and I spent a couple of days with Lawyer Sis, about two hours’ drive south, before Baby was due to join her beloved cousin, Buggy, Lawyer Sis’s middle child, in LA.

On the first evening we had barbeque on the deck. Lawyer Sis and Brother in Law are on a low carb diet, but they cheerfully provided everything required for anyone who still believed in sampling the major food groups. We all ate on paper plates.

After dinner we made popcorn in the microwave, climbed into the SUV and went to one of the last drive-ins left in the state. I hadn’t been to a drive-in movie for thirty years, and definitely not since they’ve abandoned those speakers on poles in favour of tuning in your radio. It was a lot warmer with the windows rolled up. The movie was dumb, but at a drive-in I guess the movie isn’t really the point.

The next morning Brother in Law put on a suit and went to work, while my sister, in her pajamas, fielded emails and phone calls from the office while entertaining me and coordinating her kids’ arrangements.

Late morning she drove me to the near-by holiday town where our brother bought an investment property a few years ago and has since then been in litigation with the former owners and the realtor. We got back around noon to find the Baby had just got up and was casually eating cereal out of a paper bowl. I had assumed the paper of the previous night was in honour of deck dining, but Baby, who makes herself at home here, knew it was the house norm.

In the afternoon we rode a ferry, bought a hostess gift for the Baby’s upcoming visit, reclaimed my youngest niece from her Greek grandmother, and smuggled my little dog under my sweatshirt into the ferry passenger cabin on the return ride, because it was way too cold to follow regulations and sit with him outside. Fellow travellers who spotted my subterfuge only smiled.

Home again, and very tired, we ate cold cuts off paper plates and cancelled the bowling alley we’d booked, though my energetic sister was keen to introduce me to “cosmic bowling”. I think that’s bowling with music and moving lights, but no doubt I’ll find out eventually.

Instead we turned on the Olympics, and as I watched the first American tele I have seen in many years, I was struck by the prescription drug ads. We have nothing like that in the UK and I wondered how British GPs would respond to the repeated suggestion “ask your doctor”. I was quite taken with the drug that stops you needing the loo when you’re on an outing and thought even Her Majesty could use that one (I once heard that royal protocol dictates she has to be within a hundred yards of one at all times). Alas the side effects, which apparently they are required to mention (they start speaking very fast at that point), make it sound not really worth it: among others, dry mouth, headache, stomach cramps, liver damage.

It turned out to be pretty much the same with all the drugs they were recommending. As soon as one looked like it would just fix me up there were threats of heart palpitations, strokes and dizzy spells, not to mention the assaults on my poor liver, already well dosed with red wine. Since they announced that women shouldn’t take the drug for reducing prostates I guess they are required to list all possible contraindications too.

Meanwhile the Lawyer Sis and Buggy’s father exchanged breezy emails about Baby’s travel arrangements.

Now I know it is not polite to make fun of someone who has invited your sixteen year old daughter to be a houseguest for a whole week, but I’m making an exception, not just because his name is St John (pronounced, quite correctly, Sin Jin – and trust one of us to find the only guy this side of Jane Eyre called that), but because he denied his child until the Lawyer Sis slapped a paternity suit on him. (And when I tell you that in divorcing the father of her first child she got him excommunicated for good measure, you probably won’t be messing with her.)

Baby thought St John’s (Sin Jin’s) email about her upcoming visit was very funny:

Our place is an old Spanish house built up in the hills with a great view. It’s hot in Los Angeles and we have palm trees everywhere, so you’ll get to wear sunglasses and a cute dress when we head out to explore Hollywood. Don’t have sunglasses or a cute dress? Save your pennies and we’ll take you shopping. Vicki knows all the best places, whether you like the latest thing or really old grungy stuff. You’ll live like a rock star for a week! Well, maybe like a back-up singer anyway.

The next day we were up early to dodge the Saturday traffic. In the ferry line my sister and my daughter applied their make up. I felt a little underdressed next to them and fumbled in my bag to see if I had remembered the lip coloured, almost invisible, lipstick I sometimes wear. Nope. As usual I had forgotten it.

By the time we got to the airport Baby had all her gels, blushes, lotions and creams packed into a clear plastic bag, her British passport stowed and her American one ready to display for a picture ID and a note of her booking reference for her e ticket. Once again I was impressed with the poise and maturity of a child only just sixteen who travels all by herself so easily across oceans and continents.

We left her in the security line. She was in LA, almost a thousand miles south, long before her aunt and I, fighting Seattle traffic, were home.

My father keeps calling my cell phone, which is not a good way of getting in touch with me, because the phone mostly doesn’t work. I’ve told him that, but though he likes to talk these days, he never was much good at listening.

His recent messages say:

“I don’t know what you’re doing out there.” and

“Someone told me you’re running a Bed and Breakfast out there.” (Thank you, brother, dear) and

“It’s 11 here in Virginia, so must be 8 am out there. I don’t know what your schedule is. Are you running a Bed and Breakfast or something?” (well, if I was, 8 am wouldn’t be a very good time to call me, would it?) and

“I’d like to talk to you about what you’re doing out there.”

My father hasn’t learned the names of my children (and no, that is not because he is suffering from senility – though he’s 84 he retired only a few years ago; up until then he was running a prestigious university programme). So I guess it is not all that surprising that he didn’t pay much attention when I told him what I am doing “out here”.

The short answer is I’m house sitting for my mother and her husband while they are hanging out in interior Alaska. The official answer is (as advised by my former boss and reported to the local head hunter firm back home) that I need to spend a few months in the US looking after the affairs of my elderly parents.

I guess the real answer, if there is one, goes something like this:

I have lived pretty much all my adult and working life in England, though for a while I’ve wanted to return to the US. It never was the right time, mainly because of the children, but twelve months ago everything seemed to be coming together. I thought I had sold my house in rural Oxfordshire. I was one of three candidates about to be interviewed for a prestigious job in New York. My youngest child had declared she wanted to finish high school living with me near NYC, and the man I loved was negotiating to buy a beautiful home where we could be together.

By New Year every one of those plans had been smashed. Nevertheless, it was pretty clear I couldn’t carry on living the way I was. My elder son had long since moved to the US. In September I had put my elder daughter on a plane to Uganda. My younger son was in his final year at university and rarely home, and my younger daughter, at school in Oxford, preferred to be at her father’s house in the city and near her friends, than out in the country where there were no shops or cinema and where she no longer knew the local kids. My job was more often tedious or frustrating than engaging. I came home every night to an empty house and cooked the same solitary meal. I watched real estate television obsessively. When I didn’t go to work I often spoke to no one except the dog all day long. I used to wonder, if I died, how long it would take to find the body.

Reader, I did not die; I came to this little island instead. My mother needed a housesitter and I needed to change my life. I got a part time job with a local non profit (now winding down) and yes, I am renting out part of the house to tourists, though the economy is so lousy there aren’t many of them (and it’s Bed Make Your Own Damn Breakfast). Otherwise I have been walking the dog and writing (mainly this blog – not much fiction yet).

I bought a return ticket I’m going to be using soon.

Meanwhile I have been rehearsing in my head the conversation with my father and I am not enjoying it. I’ve tried calculating when he’s likely to be out, so I could call and leave a message and get the credit without actually having to talk, but he’s always in.

When we talk my father will say over and over as if it’s some mantra, “Forty quarters! Forty quarters! Forty quarters!”

I know that I need to pay into Social Security for 40 quarters. Not that I’ll ever get much in the way of government cheques with only ten years’ credit, but because 40 quarters is the minimum to be eligible for Medicare. There is no way I can live in the US when I am old unless I sort that out.

My father will say, What are your plans?

It won’t be okay to have no plans.

My father will say, I think you should consider finishing your PhD.

Now this is big and this is fairly new, though it was the theme of our last conversation. My whole life he has told me that one thing no one should ever do under any circumstances is get a PhD. I can’t tell you how many times he shouted at me for even considering it: Why don’t you do something that will keep you out of the Poor House?

He must think things have got really desperate.

If you finish your PhD, he says, some little college would hire you, even as old as you are.

Thanks, Dad.

Because you need forty quarters. How long will it take you to finish?

I say I don’t know.

He says, Where will you live?

I don’t know.

How will you live?

I don’t know.

Well, what are you going to do?

I don’t know.

You need forty quarters.

I’m assuming that it is better to keep telling him I don’t know than that I am drawing up a short list of elderly American friends whom I could marry for their Social Security. (Widows get benefits.) Or that my latest “plan” is to live part time on my narrow boat, illegally moored on the Oxford Canal, and part time in a van in the USA as a peripatetic cleaning lady.

Because I have worked out that only 12 hours a week at $15 an hour, 25 weeks a year for 10 years gives me the minimum income to qualify for 40 quarters. I’ll be 64 and a half, ready to retire right on time.