Number Two Daughter called this morning, in the sort of way where she calls and hangs up until eventually I call her back thus covering the £1 per minute cost of communication between here and Dubai. She was bursting with excitement for eighteen and a half minutes until eventually I told her my love had run out, because she has got a visa to go and work in Canada for two years, and fancies a bit of a change from the Emerald City, which she seems to think will take her back anyway once she has had enough of teaching Canadians to ski.
It all sounds very jetsetting and thrilling. I can’t ski at all myself and so don’t really understand the huge joy she finds in sliding down mountains on a couple of planks: but I am very impressed, and feel a bit of an international sophisticate myself, just by association.
We have got visitors coming again tonight, so I told Mark about her adventures whilst we were getting ready for them and cleaning the bedroom. I know perfectly well that they will not go anywhere near the bedroom, but I will feel like a much better hostess if I am not secretly harbouring cobwebs anywhere even out of sight, so we have had a further clean and polish and scrub of everywhere we didn’t get to yesterday.
We have put daffodils and lilies all over the house, because they were reduced to clear in Booths yesterday and they are still beautiful and unopened and Booths are quite mad to do it, and Mark brought me some freesias this morning, which are my absolute favourites, along with all the other flowers that are my absolute favourites as well like sweet peas and hyacinths. I have put these on the windowsill, and keep breathing them in every time I walk past them, which feels fresh and lovely, and their lovely scent is mingling with the cooking smells coming from the kitchen and making me feel happy.
I have threatened Lucy with all manner of horrible fates should she say a single word to tonight’s guests beyond ‘good evening’, which probably won’t present a problem since I haven’t yet refilled her tuck box for the beginning of term. I puzzled for ages about what to wear, some sort of smart casual.
This is easy for Mark, because he just has an open neck shirt and corduroy trousers and doesn’t need to worry about whether his underpants will show, or whether his shirt will come unbuttoned by accident and reveal a depressing glimpse of gone-grey-in-the-wash underwear and be embarrassing, or any of the other horrible misfortunes that can affect women who are inexpert at looking smartly casual. I tried one long floaty shirt affair that I hated because it made me look as if I was wearing a sack, until eventually I realised that it was back to front and that when I wore it with the pockets in the front it was a much improved shape. Oliver said that I looked really pretty and Mark nodded and tried to look as though he can tell the difference between shirts and said that it would be fine, but I didn’t think so and in the end settled for one of my everyday tried and trusted shirts with some dangly earrings to make me look as though I was a real grown up, which worked very nicely.
We have been rushing to get it all ready in time because we had an unexpected but rather time-consuming bonus this afternoon when a friend rang us up to tell us that they were cutting trees down in the park and that the wood was being given away. Mark went dashing straight over there, and came back with two taxi-loads. This is a magnificent thing to happen, it will take a year or so to dry out enough to be useable, but free heating is free heating, there is enough for a fortnight in winter or three weeks if it is the springtime. Somebody has asked him to go and do some dry stone walling as well, which he is swapping for a few loads of firewood, so already the supply is building up, like wealth stored for the future, it makes me feel the way people must do who have got a pension.
LATER NOTE:
I meant to carry on telling you things about the day’s events, I think: but time ran away from me and unfortunately I got side tracked away from writing at that point, so whatever marvellous inspirations I might have had I have completely forgotten and they are now lost for all eternity. It is post-dinner-party, which was brilliant fun, the food was ace, the company was ace, and we have a lovely time, and I am a bit squiffy, and a lot full of dinner, and very joyful to be alive, and happy to have such splendid friends.
We ate until everybody felt mildly unwell, and then sat round the fire with coffee and brandy and our feet up, and laughed and talked and remembered and smiled at each other until our faces hurt. It is two o’ clock in the morning and we have tidied up and are sleepy and merry and pleased with the world. I am going to go to bed and write a sober and appropriate entry tomorrow, with grammar and proper spelling and everything.
But for now it is goodnight.
