Plans

We had a rather late start to the day. Mark and I don’t finish work until everybody else is thinking about getting up, and of course Lucy is suffering from the peculiar sleeping patterns beloved of teenagers, so really it was about lunchtime before we all emerged and assembled in the kitchen together. We took the dog for a gentle amble round the Library Gardens and discussed projections for the holiday.

A holiday abroad was everybody’s top favourite daydream, but turned out to be out of the question, mostly due to the cash crisis, but helped along by the discovery that neither Lucy nor I have got an in-date passport. The cash crisis is such that when I looked online first at passport applications and second at the bank statement, I discovered that we can barely afford to renew them, never mind swan off to France or Florence or India or China, all of which were optimistically and unrealistically suggested as places where we might cheerfully occupy the several weeks of being all together.

Next we considered the camper van. For those who don’t know, this is an enormous, disreputable and very elderly vehicle kept on the road only because of Mark’s considerable engineering abilities. We bought it in France when we were drunk once, and have had lovely times in it ever since. It is thirty four years old, leaks a bit and is loud, and scruffy, and I have loved it as I have never loved a vehicle in my life before. When we get in it I can feel cares lifting off my shoulders as the engine coughs and splutters into deafening life and we chug off smokily up the road.

I keep it stocked with everything I might ever need in order that we can get in it and run away at a moment’s notice, due to a vaguely anxious feeling that one day we might be invaded or something and need to make a discreet escape. We park it in the village square and every now and again people ring the police and complain about it being big and ugly. The police in Windermere are civilised enough to consider that being hideous is not yet a crime, even if you are over thirty, and just phone us up to advise us that we can expect more abusive notes pinned to the windscreen, which make me upset and make Mark laugh.

It is the best way in the world of going on holiday, because it combines all the nicest things about being away with all the safe things of being at home. When the children were smaller and more tiresome and wouldn’t eat anything unusual or wanted bottles of milk at bedtime it was perfect, we could go and park it next to the seaside in Blackpool and feed them all the usual rubbish that they liked and still be on holiday. They had their own familiar beds and their own games and nothing surprising or new: and Mark and I could put our deckchairs out next to it and hold hands and drink wine, and watch the sun setting over the offshore wind farm, which was a nice contented thing to do and made us feel fortunate and happy together.

Mark reminded me that several bits of it, including the heater, (which is quite important as it is still only March), need mending before we start thinking in terms of adventures in it, but I felt impatient with longing for an adventure, so he is going to see what he can do.

It might be another week or two, because both taxis have got to be re-licensed this month, and already he has got a long list of broken things on them that he needs to look at before the council will accept that they are fit for another six months of charging about the Lake District loaded with tourists. There is also the small difficulty of the cash crisis and the pressing necessity to make the most of the Lake District’s springtime attractiveness to tourists by persuading them to transfer some of their cash from their pockets to ours.

But it might actually be possible. I am suddenly very excited about the idea, and Lucy suggested that when Oliver was home and Mark had had chance to fix some bits of it we could pack it up and run away to Blackpool for a couple of days. We all like Blackpool, because of the cycling and the ice skating and the being all together with the dog and no urgent work needing to be done. It is not exactly an adventure but there will be doughnuts and candy floss and fish and chips and sandcastles and donkeys and salt air and we always feel happy, especially if the sun shines.

Who wants to go to Florence anyway?