I had no idea what to title this posting: words fail me, for once.
Last night, amidst Offsprog One's hectic reunion with her best-friend-at-home, which included baking banana and chocolate muffins (hooray! that's the bad banana gone from the fruit bowl) and watching wall-to-wall episodes of The Green Wing while eating them and talking at top volume, Offsprog Two called from Bournemouth, where she'd been to visit the Art College, shouting:
'WE-MISSED-THE-TRAIN-HOME-BY-ONE-MINUTE-ITS-NOT-OUR-FAULT-NOW-THEY-WANT-80-QUID-FOR-US-TO-GET-ON-THE-NEXT-ONE-ITS-NOT-OUR-FAULT!!!'
I was the only Mummy who answered the phone, and I rather crossly agreed to finance the return to London for all three of them, if I could get tickets on some sort of transport.
She hung up on me, because I was cross.
Eventually, after a drama of shouting, hanging up, shouting, and hanging up, her two friends and herself had worked out the best thing to do was to travel by National Express bus.
For ten pence a minute, I listened to Options, and more Options, until by the time I got to speak to a person,  I had developed a coolly angry tone.
'This call is costing me ten pence a minute and it's an emergency, so don't ask me anything irrelevant and do this a quickly as possible!'
The young chap was frightened into efficiency by my haughty snarl, and in mega-quick time I'd bought three bus tickets and the silly trio were on their way home.
And so to today; between wall-to-wall tutorials, and attempts to input 173 marks to the computer system (which promptly lost them as soon as I went on to the next page), the phone rang again.
Offsprog One, this time:
'I forgot to take down the reference numbers of my train tickets so I can't collect them from the machine! Please can you log into my email account and text them to me?'
So I hacked into her account and sent her the numbers, juggling anxious students and the computer man who phoned in triumph, twice, to tell me he'd fixed the problem (he hadn't, and still hasn't).
The house is stuffed full of Offsprog Two's friends; they are her human shield, as she will not have to have a conversation with me about being stranded in Bournemouth if they're all here. Offsprog One has gone off for a couple of days, leaving a trail of half-empty cups and hair dye boxes.
Me? I am off to Glasgow tomorrow, where I will meet up with Martin and the Daintees for a lovely gig at Accies, then to the Voodoo Rooms in Edinburgh on Saturday.
If anyone ever talks to you about 'the peace and tranquility of rock'n'roll', they are absolutely right.