Panicking, not drowning (From The Northern Echo)

Panicking, not drowning

3:05pm Thursday 3rd March 2011 in Mum At Large By Ruth Campbell

􀁴NEXT time the phone rings”, I wrote in my last column, “I’m tempted to shout out: What fresh Hell is this?”

This followed a call from the boys’ school to say that the 17-year-old was in an ambulance after being knocked out playing football. When we got back from hospital the 19-year-old rang to say he was in Accident and Emergency having tests for appendicitis.

The boys’ dad is still in pain with a badly-broken shoulder, shattered in a sledging accident before Christmas.

And it wasn’t that long ago that the 12-year-old broke both wrists when he jumped out of his bedroom window while sleepwalking, just a few months after he broke another bone falling off his bike.

I suspect our family’s x-rays and case notes fill a filing cabinet all of their own at our local hospital.

About two hours after I sent my last Mum at Large column over, the phone rang. I forgot to shout out “What fresh Hell is this?” But how prescient those words were.

It was the boys’ school again: “Patrick’s been injured playing rugby. We think he needs an x-ray,”

said the school secretary. He’d broken a bone in his hand and he had to have a cast fitted.

We were about to take the boys off to New York for a half-term break.

One friend offered a piece of advice: “Knowing your family, don’t go near the edge at the top of any skyscrapers.”

I’d had the same thought myself.

Could we survive a week in one of the busiest cities in the world, with so much to see and do, without another calamity?

My heart was in my mouth when we took them up to the top of the Empire State building, and again at the top of the Rockefeller Centre. But we managed to get them all down in one piece.

We survived a couple of boat trips.

We even let them ice skate, although we just watched. There was a bit of blood, but nothing too serious, just a slice to the hand from a skating blade.

Crossing roads in heavy New York traffic was another heart-stopper.

But everything, by our standards, was going smoothly. We started to relax.

On the last night, the boys wanted to go skating again. We wanted to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. So we let the older ones take the younger boys to the rink while we got a taxi to the bridge.

Just as we were about to start walking, my husband froze. “My Blackberry, my Blackberry. Where’s my Blackberry?” As anyone who has a Blackberry knows, these mobile phone and email messaging devices are addictive. That’s why they’re also called Crackberries. He had been glued to his all week. Now it was gone.

Apart from the fact it was worth about £400, it had so much information on it: all his contacts and lots of family photographs, including fantastic images of our week in New York. He may have left it in the taxi.

It may have dropped elsewhere.

He had an old phone in his bag, but we didn’t know his Blackberry number.

So we tried one of the boys, who did have it, on his mobile. There was no answer. If only we could call it, perhaps an honest taxi driver or member of the public would answer.

It was our only hope.

We didn’t even see the bridge. We jumped straight into another taxi to get back to the ice skating rink. We leave a trail of lost items every time we go on holiday. This time we had already mislaid several pairs of gloves, a scarf, a swimming hat and one shoe. But nothing as bad as this.

My husband was his usual laidback, acquiescent self along the journey.

Not. (As they say in New York).

By the time we got back, we had been phoning the boys continually for about 30 minutes. Still no answer.

They weren’t on the rink. By the time I found them, in the changing rooms, I had imagined all sorts of potential disasters.

I must have looked flustered: “Thank God you’re okay. There’s been an emergency, I need your phone quickly,” I said, grabbing William’s phone and rushing outside to get a signal.

Their dad was waiting on the pavement.

I handed him the phone. Of course, no one answered. I went back to fill the boys in.

“Where’s Dad? What’s happened?”

asked 12-year-old Roscoe. When I told them, they looked relieved: “I thought he had fallen off the Brooklyn Bridge or something,” said Roscoe. Given our family history, it wasn’t an unreasonable assumption.

Suddenly, it didn’t seem so much of an emergency. “It could have been worse, Dad,” they told him when we all met up. “You could be in the Hudson River right now.” Losing a Blackberry, it’s not so bad.

THE guide who took us on a tour of the Statue of Liberty asked children if they noticed any important symbols. Hands shot up: “The torch.” “The crown.” “Very good,” said the guide. “But what is that she’s holding in her left arm?” he said, pointing to the stone tablet. A little hand shot up: “Is it an iPad?”