Week 271: Laundrette
November 11, 2023
- Lying in bed… warm… sleepy… my brain is wandering through some fantasy worlds… I am drifting gently into sleep… I am yanked awake by an urgent yelp from my daughter’s room. I walk then run downstairs and find her, in the darkness, covered in congealed milk and still vomiting. It’s in her hair, it’s on her nightie, she is shaking, confused, and crying.
- I shower her off as she squats in the bath, washing the bits of sick from her hair and thinking about how much I love her, and then I tie her clean hair on a bun on top of her head in case she throws up any more.
- She is sick every 30 minutes until 6am.
- I get into a sleeping bag and lie on her floor in the gloom. E is good at getting the sick in the bowl but eventually we run out of clean bed sheets anyway and I just start piling towels over the patches of sick in the bed.
- The next day I take work calls at the laundrette as I try to get through all the sicky sheets. The laundrette is busy, every machine is in use. I’m puzzled as to why so many people have so much washing to but I am too tired to listen in to their conversations and figure it out. I am trying to work out how much change to use and what order to wash things in, and how long I can leave the laundrette for for the optimal time back at home looking after my daughter. Everything feels very hard… the logistical problem of lining up all of these jobs should be a fun problem but I can’t get to the answer.
- I went to FFConf on Friday, my annual reunion with Jake.
- I had my second lesson with my new driving instructor. He is, I think, helping my confidence by being more relaxed, but he also has a penchant for creepy “jokes”. Like, while helping me put my cardigan back on (already unneccesary?) he said “helping a lady put her clothes back on - that’s unusual for me!”. Keep those jokes inside your head my dude.
- He also keeps on making fun of me for being posh. Something we can all agree is quite annoying is when someone makes fun of you for a trait you don’t beleive you have. An example: he tried to make fun of me for going to a private school? Except he had never asked where I went to school? And it was a state school? And last week he made fun of me for the people scraping the weeds off the pavement on my road. But that’s Brighton and Hove council policy to not use weed killer. So… that makes every single resident of Brighton and Hove posh?
- His car is also quite dirty. My previous instructor’s car was pristine. We used to joke about how one of his other learners owned a cat and came to the first lesson covered in cat hair and my instructor made him go and get changed.
- Ah well. I will continue to learn to drive until I can, and along the way I will have to suffer the personalities of people who are called to be driving instructors.