What a week it’s been, poor Charlotte off school with chicken pox, lots of work to do and we’re also looking to move house, then my poor boy Iain phoned me to say he was with the police who he had rung because he had found a man lying on the train track by Fulbourn Tescos. He had tried to talk to the man to get him to move but the train was already coming and there was nothing he could do – he saw it all. I am very proud of Iain he acted so sensibly, he phoned the police, helped his mate who was with him, helped the train driver and covered the remains with his jacket so that passers by wouldn’t see. But as you can imagine it was a very traumatic thing to go through and see. I had to sleep downstairs with Iain the first night after it had happened as it made him feel very strange. He seems to be coping with it well, you never know how these experiences will affect people and everyone can react differently. Iain has some counselling set up for if he needs it, it certainly has been a difficult week. There used to be a Samaritans phone box by the railway at this spot as it is a suicide hotspot but when the new footpath was made the phone box was taken away and never replaced. It really needs to be put back – you only have to look at the statistics from other counties which do have the special phone box at hotspots to see just how much this helps and reduces the number of suicides at these places.

Poor little Charlotte woke up in the middle of the night last Tuesday and she was covered in spots – I couldn’t believe it as they weren’t there when she went to bed and she didn’t seem unwell. I took her straight to the doctors in the morning and they confirmed that it was chicken pox. Charlotte has hardly ever been off school with anything, in fact I cannot remember her ever being of ill but she didn’t seem to mind, she wasn’t very ill in herself but the itching drove her up the wall for about 3 days. The spots were in her hair and inside her mouth too. We used loads and loads of Calamine lotion and by the Friday Charlotte looked like ‘Stig of the Dump’ as she hadn’t been able to brush her hair because of the spots on her head and we had even had to poor calamine on her head. She is loads better now and the spots stopped itching and started healing over the weekend. I took her back to school yesterday and she’s there today but next week is half term anyway! It’ll take a couple of weeks for those spots to go completely but at least she isn’t infectious to anyone now – we were confined to the house for about a week!