Okay, I have to share some good news because I'm just quite frankly thrilled about it!

Some of you know and some you don't know that my parents are divorced (thank god). As this is britain and a supposedly civilised nation, he had to start paying us child support. That was... eleven years ago and for a time things were working out fine.

Then, two years or so ago, my father took early retirement, getting 50 THOUSAND pounds as support funds and immediately making sure to inform the CSA (child support agency) so as to get our policy adjusted so that he wouldn't have to pay us anything. (We'd had some problems at the beginning with him switching jobs as often as possible so the CSA could never force him to pay anything, so we were waiting for him to figure something out).

Only, the CSA, in their government ways, took two years to get around to making a proper survey and adjusting the pay. Only, during that time they'd still been taking the money out of his acount and putting it in my mums.

So they figured out that nearly six grand had been paid to us that shouldn't have been... And sent us a poorly spelt and frankly rude letter saying that we would have to pay it back.

I'd like to point out, we wouldn't be getting child support if we weren't already at the lower end of the financial ladder. Not only that, but my mum has leukaemia, which has one rather major trigger for coming out of remission. Stress. Don't worry, we were fortunate. But rather understandably furious.

So, as you can imagine, we refused to pay. In fact, we started taking action. Mum wrote to the local MP and then started collecting information on other cases that had been handled so poorly. She started talking to lawyers and considered going to the media, especially since a lady had just recently been on the news furious about her own (rather appalling) case.

Then we got a timid call. "Um, we've decided to review your case and, um, to write off your debt. We'll ah, even give you some compensation!" (It was only £70 but we were too happy about the loss of debt either way).

Well you can imagine our joy at that moment!

Now we've gotten even more good news. Father-dearest had re-employed his method of skipping about from job to job and spending some periods of time completely unemployed so we'd had even more difficulty getting the rest of the child support deal sorted out. Then Sophie discovered he'd started working abroad by a slip of the tongue from his long-term girlfriend. Mum phoned the CSA and asked them to do another review to see if we should be getting any money now.

They got back to us within a few weeks this time *happy grin* to inform us that yes, in fact we should be getting some money and that daddy-dearest would have to pay us in arrears for the time he spent skipping about too, considering the fact that he's actually got quite a bit more money than us now and is earnning a decent amount too!

So finally, some good news (brilliant news!) that has provided us with some much-needed reassurance!

I'm not going to count my chickens too fast though! Who knows what method he'll employ to get out of paying us next? *rolls eyes*

But yay for good news! And with the lovely weather we've been having lately I'm feeling... Languidly happy!

Love to you all!