May Contain Nuts Read Online Free PDF

stay awake and came down three times between eight o’clock and midnight before finally crashing out. And I noticed that Molly’s nail-biting habit had now extended to the surrounding skin. There was a raw crescent of bloody skin around the base of each nail. She had talked about becoming a vegetarian but I told her she would have to stop eating her own fingers first.
    Even though this was just a practice run, I couldn’t help but feel that it was incredibly important, that tomorrow I would discover whether the rest of my daughter’s life would be one of spiralling success and happiness or whether she would fall at the first fence in the high-pressure steeplechase of modern life. Did Molly sense my anxiety? Is it normal for parents to snap at their children like that just for asking to watch a second episode of The Simpsons and then burst into tears saying, ‘Sorry, sorry, darling. God, I’m just so worried about your mock test – no, I didn’t mean that, I’m not worried at all, just do your best and I’ll buy you a really big present if you do well. Or even if you don’t.’ None of the parenting books had recommended this particular approach, but we all find our own methods for dealing with our children. Shouting at them, then crying, apologizing, then bribing: all within sixty seconds. I sometimes wondered if I simply wasn’t cut out tobe a mother. I tried to imagine myself as a single childless woman approaching forty, friends with lots of gay men and over-concerned about animal rights. Maybe I would have been just the same if I had lived on my own with a golden retriever. ‘Oh my God, Shandy isn’t retrieving as well as the other dogs in the park, maybe he’s dyspraxic, maybe I pushed him too early, maybe I should get a private life-coach to help him with his stick-fetching.’
    Molly’s practice test would be modelled on the entrance exam for Chelsea College. Everyone knew that it was the only school to go to, because everyone else said so. Chelsea College had rapidly become one of the great London public schools after the government flogged off the Royal Hospital and shipped the few remaining Chelsea Pensioners off to a hospice somewhere on the south coast (pledging that they would jealously safeguard the dignity of the newly dubbed ‘Bognor Pensioners’). The imposing pillars, vast courtyards and lush sports pitches all in a central riverside location had given this new school a grand air of tradition and magnificence and created a stampede in the panicking herd of middle-class parents desperately chasing places at ‘the best school’.
    My children simply had to go there. All the problems of the world would evaporate once my daughter had got herself a place, and every snippet of information was viewed through that lens. ‘The main item on the news tonight: militant Islamic terrorists threaten bomb attack on Britain.’
    Oh no, I’d think, what if Chelsea College got blown up? They wouldn’t be able to admit any new pupils.
    â€˜â€¦ And how global warming could leave half of London under water …’
    Yes, but which half ? Molly’s new school is right next to the river, are there enough classrooms upstairs?
    Molly would not be taking the mock exam on her own. All her friends had gone to the same private tutor to give them an edge over their friends. And today the tutor’s pupils were brought together in a rented hall where he did his best to recreate authentic exam conditions by sitting at the front sneezing and blowing his nose loudly for three hours. A practice run would allow them to approach the real thing with a little more confidence, we told one another, and, who knows, maybe the competitive element might spur them all on to try their very hardest. Not that we were making it into a competition, though Ffion did announce that there would be a giant tin of Quality Street for the child who got the