‘It’s all gone horribly wrong!’

My daughter had a playdate after school yesterday with her best friend; I got a call at 4.45pm from the mum, who yelled, ‘It’s all gone horribly wrong. Can you come and get her?’, while my daughter wailed in the background. I ran up the road in my wellies. Turns out the girls had had their first major bust-up over [timpani roll…] the correct title of ‘Monsters vs Aliens’. Best Friend thought it was ‘Monsters and Aliens’, while my daughter, ever the pedant (she is the child of two former sub-editors, after all), insisted it wasn’t. ‘It’s versus! VERSUS!!!!’ At which point, Best Friend had a flash-forward to secondary school in 10 years’ time and my daughter yelling in her ear, ‘You should have used a semi-colon, do you hear me? A SEMI-COLON!!’, and decided, quite understandably, that she didn’t want to be best friends any more.
In a very tenuous way, this leads me onto my ‘Unattractive Moan of the Day’. Which is my, and my husband’s, current state of unemployment*. We had a good whinge today about the decline of print journalism (yes, we know how to keep the magic in our marriage alive!) and how my ‘key skill’ – checking the spelling on books and magazines – isn’t exactly in demand. On days like these I actually believe I might never work again. Weirdly, I even found myself in tears about it today (for about 45 seconds, until I remembered the awful earthquake in Haiti. And trafficked teenage girls. And my good friend whose child has multiple health issues). I think I must have PMT, or SAD. Please send me some verbal slaps! Not too hard, though…

* Maybe we should re-brand ourselves as ‘job-free’?