NotSheep

As mentioned, we had a great day yesterday…at least for as long as we were at the aquarium. The drive home, however, was another matter. An incident on the motorway earlier in the day resulted in the closure of three of the main motorways around the city, and total chaos throughout the city. Stretches of road that would normally take about a minute, even in rush-hour, were taking 35 minutes or more to travel. We stopped to get some food for everyone in the hope that things would ease up, but no such luck. If I hadn’t had to make it back for Beavers, we’d have given up and spent the evening somewhere close - but we had arranged to take the Beavers on a trip to a police station and I was supposed to transporting some of the boys. The police sent a bus for us, but we had more Beavers than there were seats on the bus. After some frustrated phone-calls as I sat in traffic, I got hold of one of the Cub leaders and she agreed to go on the bus so my co-leader at Beavers could drive. I still had to go to the police station though, since I had one of the Beavers (Freddy), and, as it turned out, George and Jack came too. By the time I got to the police station, a journey that should have been less than two hours had taken more than five hours - and I still had an hour in the station followed by another half hour in the car to get home. The Beavers all had a good time at the police station though, and it became the joke du jour to get on the loudspeaker system in the police jeep and shout that I was under arrest - so one of the policemen said, “We’ll be needing these then” and slapped some handcuffs on me Then it got even worse - he took them off again

Woke up this morning feeling completely shattered and with a heavy cold, but struggled through the morning with the help of several cups of tea, then left them all to entertain themselves after lunch while I went back to bed with Toby. Henry had a difficult start to the day - we sat down with his English book and got as far as the first sentence before he rushed from the room sobbing “I need a minute”. I found him crying in the living-room; he said he’d had nightmares last night about going back to France. I already knew he wasn’t keen to going back to school, but he said there were “lots of things” he wasn’t looking forward to, and sobbed, “It’s too good here!” He also said he had a nightmare about something bad happening to the other boys and us. It’s good that he feels such a bond with us, and that he’s enjoyed his time here so much, but I really hadn’t thought until now about how hard it must be for a child to leave a family after spending six months with them. There is so much involved in an exchange; it’s such a learning process for all of us.

Cubs for George and Scouts for Barney and Henry this evening - they’ve only got two more Scout meetings before they fly off to France