I don’t know who our daughter employs as her media advisers and spin doctors, but maybe Tony Blair should try and head hunt them. She is in both local papers today.

In the Crawley Observer there is a photo of her looking very scary for a 14-year-old, what with the camo paint and gun and everything. To be honest, I didn’t recognise her until I saw the caption with her (mis-spelled) name underneath.

She is also in another photo, on the right of a group picture of 5 people. I didn’t recognise her in that until she pointed it out – even her mother didn’t recognise her straight away.

In the story itself she is quoted saying how much she enjoys being in the cadets and wishes the annual camp lasted longer. Obviously we beat her to within an inch of her life for saying that she didn’t want to come home[*]

In the Crawley News there is yet another photo of Chrystal on her own, armed and dangerous, and more quotes in the story. Again her name is spelled wrong…

There is a slight inaccuracy in the quote as well. Her brothers are not in the army cadets any more as it states. They joined a couple of years ago and persuaded her that it was fun, but she is the only one that kept it up. She even gave up rugby and athletics so she could continue with the army cadets.

Even so, extra copies of the Observer have been bought for posting to grandparents, along with spare copies of the News left over from Charlie’s paper round.

The sad thing is that she cannot do what she really wants to do in the army, much to our secret relief. For some reason she would really like to be in the front-line infantry, but apparently women are not allowed to do that. It isn’t fair but as parents we are not complaining!

Here are the other bits from the paper. Poor quality as I don’t have a scanner – but if any of my regular readers from the News and Observer want to send me any original jpg files to make up for spelling her name wrong they are quite welcome. Of course I know that the reporter who visited the camp was probably from neither paper but either a freelancer or sort of pool journalist who supplied the story to both of them, which explains the remarkable similarity of the stories, and excuses the spelling of ‘Chrystal’… now what is the excuse for the Crawley News’ original spelling of the word ‘exercise’?

[*] Obviously not true. She is as tall as me and just spent two weeks being taught how to fight. I am not totally stupid!