A moving story. With an inflatable giraffe, and promises of duffel coats.

Today we drove to Sheffield to drop off a daughter.  Oh, it's all right, it was one of my daughters, I didn't just fancy a long drive in order to lose someone else's daughter - it's much too far to go to miscellaneously dispose of any girl children that happen to be lounging about on the sofa.  Anyway.  Off we set in the big car, which is  large enough to contain (variously), two teddy bears, an inflatable giraffe, a hot water bottle, two life-sized bags of dried pasta and a knife-fork-and-spoon set.  Without which, apparently, life at University wouldn't be worth living.  So, it appears that said daughter is expecting a flood, from which she will be saved by inflating the giraffe, float to safety whilst surviving on pasta and teddy-bear stuffing, protected from the chill only by her fleecy-covered hot water bottle.

Quite how this fits in with Accountancy I have yet to have revealed to me.  Perhaps all accountants are secretly sitting on cushions like this whilst auditing your accounts.  The thought makes me smile, anyway.

So.  At the crack of lunch-time we set out for Sheffield, which on paper is only...ooooh...about....this far away.  However, given the general lack of roads around here it took three ice ages before we arrived, and almost an entire packet of chocolate eclairs (not me, not me, the driver ate them...) even whilst travelling at speeds approaching warp (at one point I think light actually bent around the car, and I swear I am now three years younger than I was when we left).  But we got there.  And then the doors wouldn't open, even when we waved the Magic Key of Doom at the transmitter and uttered Harry-Potteresque sayings at it ('Openupimus' and similar).

The knob turned the other way, apparently.  Who knew?

And then, to add insult to an already quite injurious day, she insisted on coming back home with us!  More stuff to transport later, apparently!  So it's not even as though I can sit down with a nice hot cup of tea and the knowledge of a job well done - no, I can perch on the edge of a sofa on which said daughter is now sprawled (tired out after all that door-opening, you know), and look forward to doing the whole thing again! 

Well, after all, we haven't moved the stuffed sloth, the fourteen odd socks, three hundredweight of coal and the thirty-year-old duffel coat yet.

Try to imagine my joy at being able to get rid of this.  Wouldn't be so bad, but it's ninety feet long...