“Dad, can I fly to Edinburgh for the International Harp Festival?”
“Eh, let’s see… we’re broke, there’s a war on, increased risk of terrorism internationally, and SARS outbreaks all over. No.”
“Puhleeze?”
“Well, okay, just this once.”

I got a little sleep over the weekend, so maybe I can tell this story better today. On the other hand, my wife and I are on this Supermodel Diet that promises to help you lose up to five kilos in a single week. So far, I’ve hit the usual wall at 2 kilos, but we’ll see. It does make you light-headed, to the point where it wouldn’t be surprising if angels appeared and asked you out for a drink.

As I suggested before, the airlines had been planning to cause our daughter problems on her flight to Edinburgh, but my wife quickly made their ground personnel cry and they printed out boarding passes and handed them over, begging her to leave them alone.

“What’s a boarding pass?” our daughter asked. The concept was explained. Before, this lack of knowledge might have worried us, but she’s young, we realized, she’ll learn quickly, and anyway, she’s still far more in touch with planet Earth than the 17-year-old girl (the one we thought was mature and stable and with it and who we thought would look after her if there were problems) who thought the plane left at 7 in the evening, 12 hours off.

We made our daughter promise to look after her, instead.

Anyway. The kid has a mobile phone with her, she called us from Scotland after arriving and told us all was well. The lady organizing the festival, who had been a great help to us, was very happy with the box of assorted chocolates our daughter brought her at my wife’s urging. Austrians always bring people chocolates, because they think foreigners are crazy about Austrian chocolates.

We’d been worried whether our daughter would get a rental harp; turns out she got two. Maybe the chocolates are a good idea after all. The weather’s nice, the venue (swanky boys’ school, but boys all away on spring break) is beautiful, hundreds of harps going all the time, all that. They have classes, but the girls still found time to go into Edinburgh and go shopping Saturday.

My daughter bought me fudge. Malt whisky fudge. Am I raising that girl right or what?

I’d been trying to talk her into hooking up with Shauny, who is now in Edinburgh, but somehow my daughter is still too young to grasp the inherent coolness of meeting a famous and brilliant and very funny blogger her dad knows only from her weblog. Kids.

So we back at home sort of live our lives in this grey haze until the eldest reappears, scratching out our meager existence as it were, sleeping in on Saturday instead of getting up to rush her early to school because Austrians have school Saturdays; spending more time and attention with the younger daughter, who soaks it up like a dry sponge; all that. Living from phone call to phone call, “how’s the food? Met anyone yet? How’s the weather? Any boys there?” “Mo-om.”

Except for the sightseeing and shopping, it sounds like she’s spending most of her time hanging around the festival like a good girl (yeah, okay, that’s what she says anyway). One night they’d meant to stay up late and go to a ceili, but ended up falling asleep instead so they missed it. It’s nice that she’s independent enough to do something like this by herself, and somehow comforting that she’s still too young to go wild and stay up late drinking pints with young Scottish men.

We won’t stop worrying until she gets home, of course. Not even then, really. Excuse me, I have to go fix some more gin for some angels.