Countdown

Three days till we go away, so I'm just getting warmed up into that desperate last-minute frenzy. The sitting-room door is now covered with large pieces of paper with Lists on them in permanent marker. There are three pages of things we need to take, and two of things that need to be done before we go. Older daughter has 2 items on her list of things to do; younger, about 5, John, 2 (though, to be fair, these are things I thought of, and he has plenty of other items on his list that haven't made it to paper) - which leaves me with about 40 things to do, of which so far I've done about 7. Oh dear.
John got back from Cairo this morning, and seems to have brought the Pharoah's Revenge, or something similar, with him. Still, there are toilets on aeroplanes. I'm sure it'll be fine.
I took the rabble into the town centre today, on last-minute errands. We were there for the two minute silence in memory of those killed in the bombings. Everyone observed it, except two or three people, who kept their heads down and pushed through the stationary crowds as if they couldn't see them. I saw one such woman, striding along, being stopped by an older man who held her arm a moment, and must have told her to stand still: she did. Everyone was standing, nobody moved. There were people of every age and colour, all united for that brief moment in marking the shared defiance against the cruel bombing of last week. I find that moments like that give me a sense of national pride which, in British culture, is not something one often consciously dwells on. It's good that we mark such moments.
My mother reckons that Britain's strengh, during WWII, largely lay in carrying on with ordinary things in the face of the worst the enemy could offer. You never know where or when a tragedy may strike, so why clutter life with undue caution and fear? Not only does that feed into the hands of the terrorists, but it's also, probably, rather a waste of time. I often feel that, since many of the things I worry about are mutually exclusive, perhaps I shouldn't worry about any of them at all. If I develop nv CJD, then I won't need to worry about my pension, or terminal cancer. If John gets blown up by a terrorist on a business trip, then not only will I be rich on insurance money, but I won't need to worry about him getting heart disease like his father, any more. If something, God forbid, happened to one of the children and they were brain damaged or paralysed, then I needn't worry about drug addition. If we all get avian flu and die, then it won't matter that we never bought the house of our dreams. And so on. There are limitless dreadful things one can imagine, and I could waste hours and hours in lurid fantasies of personal despair: but they can't all come true, and very likely none of them will.
So, I shall assume that we have a great time in the South, with no hurricanes, air disasters or West Nile Virus attacks (you see, I use the internet to feed my fear, which is a bad idea, because now I know that the peak age for encephalitis complications from WNV is age 40+, which is information I did not need), and tomorrow, I might even start packing. If I get time, after sorting out costumes for the Harry Potter book launch, that is.