I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas any more!

Read any blog from Blighty written in the past 24 hours and it likely will mention the wind. Seems Ambridge has not been immune to the destabilizing effects yesterday's storm force winds had on the whole UK.

So now, today, in the post ictal calm that follows the aforementioned storm, I'm not quite sure where I am. And given my last consultation we may have been warped into a prallel dimension where the laws of Faerie apply, because I have just had a consultation with Cinderella. The fact that she came hobbling in wearing one high heeled fur* trimmed "slipper" should have been a bit of a clue. That and the fact her best mate was called Buttons...

But the awful truth is, like the fairytale character, this young lady has real confidence / assertiveness issues. Mum and Step-Dad both work long hours, and so are out of the house early in the morning, leaving poor Cinders to see to the care and feeding of her two younger step-brothers. Having got them up, dressed, fed, and ready for school she has to get of to school herself, faced with the prospect of doing the same things in reverse when she gets home.
So at home she is moody, tearful, not eating well, and Mum has decided she must be depressed. She's really not. She's just cross, hurt and fed up in equal measure, and with some justification.

Of course so far I only have this one side of the story, but from her presentation it really does appear that, like Cinderella, she has become "invisible" to her parents, and this lack of recognition and appreciation have effectively destroyed her emergent self esteem at a time when she is most vulnerable.

I have offered to meet with her and Mum to try to negotiate some sort of r'approchement, but I suspect her salvation may lie in the hands of a "man" in tights, with a thigh slapping habit and the matching fur trimmed slipper, given the way things are round here at the moment.

* Mrs Snell would want me to point out that the whole "glass slipper" thing comes from a sloppy translation from the French** story when the hapless translator took Vair for Verre and at a stroke turned fur to glass with nary so much as an alchemic grimmoire for assistance.

** She would further point out the origin of the tale is actually a Chinese fable of great antiquity appropriated by the French sometime after, and thence finding it's way to our shores.