Categories: uncategorized
Date: 12 December 2004 12:46:40
Don't try this at home, kids, or even at Alton Towers. I think that yesterday I managed to experience the entire gamut of feelings within a scant eight hour period. I'm so full of adrenalin I think I could burst - but I'm at work, so I can't even run madly around a field screaming, which is the only thing that might, possibly, help.
So, yesterday. Driving Test day. Regular readers of this blog may realise that I have failed six driving tests now - which would make me an amusing candidate for one of those documentary programmes, but hasn't done much for my self-esteem. I'm an emotional wreck beforehand and need serious amounts of tea and calming (and then I'm desperate for the loo all the way through the test, which doesn't help). Other regular readers of this blog may also know that a family member of ours is seriously unwell. Big op was on Thursday and he's come through that ok. We're also spending a lot of time helping out a friend of ours whose wife is also very seriously (and longterm) unwell. We spent some time with him Friday night - not feeling entirely good about how that went, and got home later than either of us would have liked.
And so Saturday's tower of stress begins to build. Wake (relatively) early, ready for test, and have a leisurely breakfast. So far, so good, but then.... a phonecall telling us just what we don't want to hear about this relative and his condition. It's a horrid shock, to be honest, and I know I've got five minutes to go before my driving instructor picks me up. Basically, I'm now a shaking wreck - mixing terror, sadness and panic in a cocktail I wouldn't advise anyone to try. Shaken and stirred, I do an hour of driving around, totally muck up several parallel parks and then arrive at the test centre.
Check my phone (nearly all journalists are phone obsessives). Text message. Not horrid, thank God. From our friend, who seems to have found someone who can help him and his wife. "crying tears of happiness" apparently, which is pretty lyrical (and unlike him) as text messages go. So now I add a little, teeny, bit of relief to the somewhat nauseating pre-Christmas cocktail sloshing around my stomach. I walk into the test centre...
Don't remember all that much about the next forty five minutes - except that I desperately wanted to be able to give my husband some good news. Mucked up a few things, I think, but the examiner was genuinely lovely. When I pulled up outside the test centre, he said "Now, if you were to have passed your test you would need less than 16 minor faults" (and my pedantic brain thought "fewer than 16" and my heart sank). And then he said. "you got twelve, so you've PASSED".
Reader, if you haven't got bored yet and gone away. I wept. Can't quite believe it. Never had to ring my parents and tell them quite so much good and bad news in one phone call before. But I CAN DRIVE! Which makes me a proper grownup at 27.
My emotions are all confused and I don't know where I am this morning. Well, I do, I'm at work and I'm panicking. I've got to sing Mozart's Voi Che Sapete tonight at a concert... and my mind is all OVER the place.
Not so much an emotional rollercoaster, perhaps, as an entire daytrip to the emotional themepark. All I need is some emotional candyfloss and a trip to the emotional souvenir shop. And then maybe I could go back to bed. Please?