Children should be chipped at birth. I have long advocated for this method of being able to know where your offspring are, at any given time, when the necessity arises. No child would ever be lost again. Only to be activated in time of need of course.
For anyone who has children of a certain age and has watched the Liam Neeson film ‘Taken’, I’m sure you will feel a connection to this next story in the saga that revolves around my daughter H. I will skip over the day she was on the phone to us when she cut us off mid-sentence due to her helicopter arriving to take her to the Formula1 Barcelona Grand Prix……….
In 2015 H was just eighteen and briefly living and working in Milan, when she was requested on a shoot in Berlin, Germany. Taking the flight, working and flying back in the space of a day or so, we asked her to inform us when she arrived back in Milan, as being parents, we naturally feel a level, although small in nature but perfectly formed, of responsibility for the eldest of our three children who was flying alone round the world. Whilst allowing her to live in London from the tender age of seventeen, to further her career of being an international model, we drew criticism from many quarters and maintaining our high position in the Bad Parents of the Year Award League was not something we were particularly striving for, or in our opinion, deserved. All who have spent time with H will concur with me, that to be successful in her chosen career she does have to have a particular mind set and a skin thickness tantamount to that of an African White Rhino.
Most of those early modelling days necessitated M consulting Google Street View to be able to direct H to her destination, like the time she alighted from the train at Kings Cross, London and called M at work for instructions on how to get to the next shoot. M consulted Google Street View and told H to look across the road to the Chinese takeaway on the corner opposite. Informing M that there wasn’t such a takeaway opposite her, a rather stressed M inquired as to what shop H could see, to which she replied, “I can’t see any shops, there’s a bus parked there!” With gritted teeth M told H to cross the road. H responded with “I can’t. There’s a metal fence that I can’t climb over!” M told H to find the gap. At this request H asked M “do you know how far that is?” followed by an exasperated “bare with……” as she made her way to the gap leaving M holding the phone listening to H’s feet tapping away down the pavement. Finding the gap and crossing the road H informed M that she could now see the takeaway shop and knew where to go. Ending the call abruptly, we didn’t hear from her again until the next time she needed directions a few days later!
With H’s confirmed attendance in Berlin, she completed the contract and informed us of her imminent departure back to Milan. Under strict instruction to let us know when she had made it safely back to her hotel in Italy, she jetted off……………
A day passed and with no word of her safely arriving back in Milan we became increasingly alarmed to the point of me packing and getting flight details to go in search of her. We asked her then boyfriend whether he knew of her whereabouts and he responded with a vague comment that she was not in Italy, but in the south of France at a yacht party! Being told to stop mucking about didn’t achieve any different story from him so, unable to contact her mobile, we waited for some form of confirmation of her well-being direct from H herself. It transpired that she was indeed at a yacht party in the south of France. A group of the girls had gone with a promoter to a party in Monaco.
H came home to visit us that weekend and while I was watching the Monaco Grand Prix, H yelled at me to pause the TV. She then proceeded to point out her friends in the pit lane and said “that’s where I would have been if I hadn’t come home to see you!”…….
Did H at any point think that a telephone call home might have incurred us popping out to see her, sharing a walk along the pit lane together? Free passes to the F1 Monaco Grand Prix apparently mean nothing to H! She even had to ask “isn’t that where the cars just drive round and round? It is rather boring!”
Does anyone know where my picnic with one sandwich short is? I bet H does!
Can you chip an adult yet?
Carry on regardless!
DJ
Carry On Regardless 
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