I am having the very disconcerting experience of writing this somewhere else altogether.
I am not in my own safe orange-and-yellow-with-stick-on-flowers office, but in my Dad’s office, far from home. There are interesting pictures on the walls and piles of intriguing-looking personal letters and bills etc piled up on the desk about which I am trying very hard to restrain my curiosity. Of course nobody else’s letters are likely to be any more interesting than my own, none of them will be suicide notes from discarded lovers or letters from foreign dignitaries about lost family estates, very probably they will be the same drivel as mine, about discounts on boilers and not renewing house insurance, but nevertheless it all looks fascinating and I am having to be very restrained not to have a good investigate whilst I am sitting here unsupervised.
I am so curious about it all that I have hardly been able to write anything. There are pictures on the wall, some of which I like very much and some of which I don’t think I do (too dark, too angular) and illustrations done by their other grandchildren. I have inspected these closely to make sure that they are not as good as anything produced by my side of the family, but I think we probably come out of it all right. There are useful things like really sharp pencils and post-it notes close to hand, and a pile of stick-on address labels which I think is a brilliant idea, and I wish I could pinch a sheet to take at home and use myself.
We have, as you have gathered, gone away. We dashed about all morning packing up the children and the camper van and the dog and we have gone somewhere else.
We are, of course, down here because we are going to go to a wedding tomorrow. This means we have needed to bring nice smart clothes as well as our usual collection of comfortable jeans and worn T-shirts. I have got no idea if we have packed everything that we will need to achieve this smart turn out. It all started off in a very sensible and orderly fashion, but by the end as we got later and later I was just hurling forgotten shoes and tights and makeup in anywhere I could find a space, and shouting at everybody because they were all milling about dreamily being pleased about going away and nobody cared if we got to the wedding tomorrow and found out we had forgotten somebody’s tie, or socks, or underwear, except me, and I only cared because tomorrow everybody will say to me: What have you done with my…? and it is ghastly to have to say that I have left it in the washing basket at home and then have to do something awful like send a child to a wedding with a beautiful dress and smart jacket and Ugg boots or trainers.
In the end we managed to chug away, and I was cross and upset for the first ten minutes, especially when I realised that I had forgotten to give anybody any lunch. Mark resolved that by calling in at a petrol station and buying the children an enormous bag of crisps and finding some dried pineapple and chocolate in the bottom of his bag. We had a travelling picnic with those and the world began to feel better. I have got a really good book about the civil war out of the library, and I sat very, very quietly and read that for a bit until my peaceful equilibrium was properly restored.
I love travelling. Especially I love coming to places like this that are so very different from home, my eyes were on stalks all the way through the town. There are things to look at everywhere. There were all sorts of things being advertised all over the place, all of which were intriguing and colourful, some of which looked exciting, and some of which we weren’t quite sure what they were. What, for example, is a burrito? We thought that it must be edible, but beyond that none of us had any idea, except Oliver, who thought it might be a sort of sandwich.
It was late afternoon by the time we finally arrived. My mother had cooked an enormous splendid dinner with pudding, which of course inspired Lucy and Oliver to launch into some treacherous detail about my own culinary shortcomings, which fortunately were so awful that my parents thought they must be exaggerating and just nodded and smiled at them in a humouring-you sort of way. We felt very on-holiday, which led to my knocking back three glasses of wine really quickly in a spirit of cavalier freedom, and then longing to go to sleep but not being able to because of the effort involved in putting the beds together in the camper van.
Mark has gone off to do that now whilst I write this, which is really kind. The children are getting cleaned up in Grandma’s shower and I am going to have a cup of tea and then go to bed, and when I wake up I won’t be in my own bed at all but somewhere completely different, on my holidays with no taxis anywhere.
It is a lovely, holiday feeling.
