This is a terribly late post because instead of writing a diary I have spent all evening sitting round our dining table, drinking wine and wrangling happily about politics and eating lovely squishy aromatic cheese and tiny sweet tomatoes and drinking too much wine.
It should have been a pleasant sort of day getting things ready for having visitors.
Unfortunately, once again we had a getting out of bed failure, and didn’t wake up until ten.
I had an instant panic, and made Mark get up straight away, and we rushed about instead of having our usual routine of sitting peaceably in bed having coffee. We put the washing machine on, and tidied up, and thought we would take the dog for a walk straight away, so that we could get on with everything else without the dreadful guilt of knowing that the dog was standing uncomfortably by the back door with his legs crossed.
We dashed off to the Library Gardens before we had our coffee to empty him, but during our amble he met a small but perfectly formed and beautiful, sleek, chestnut-coloured spaniel, and fell immediately and hopelessly in love.
Uncouth and hairy as our dog is, she reciprocated immediately and with enthusiasm, and within minutes her owners were shouting rude words and trying to drag him off. We apologised and captured him, with some difficulty, and insisted, to his evident annoyance, that he accompanied us back home.
When we got home we discovered our very nice neighbour Rob hovering in the alley with a van. Rob has a Yorkshireman’s gift for slightly dodgy serendipity, and it turned out that he had discovered a dining table and some chairs on his travels which he remembered, correctly, that we would be pleased about: so we spent ten minutes unloading and being appreciative and thinking how very useful it would be not to have to keep borrowing extra chairs from Mark’s sister, and making sympathetic noises about his tiresome morning, and didn’t notice that in the middle of it all the dog had disappeared.
Mark said a lot of rude words when we did notice, because we still hadn’t had any coffee, and we had got a busy day, and the children needed breakfast and the Autoparts van was about to turn up with some brake pads. We went trailing off to find him, and eventually Mark discovered him trying to follow the wonderful scent of his beloved up the road. As soon as he saw Mark in the distance he belted off into the middle of the main road bringing all the traffic skidding to a halt and making all the drivers shout things and make taxi-driver sort of hand signals at Mark.
Mark grabbed him and dragged him back, and when they got across the road the dog started yelping piteously, making another set of people glare at Mark because of his imagined animal cruelty, and by the time we all managed to regroup at home and get the kettle on the dog had no friends and we were very late and out of temper.
Number One Son-In-Law and Ritalin Boy turned up then, because of the brake pads which were destined for their car, and so Mark helped him fit the brake pads and Ritalin Boy charged about making a mess, and I cooked things with vegetables, and then Number One Son-In-Law helped with the wallpapering in the loft, and we had got as far as the hoovering when our visitors arrived.
Of course this was fine really, because mostly everything was all right and there was food and a bedroom and it was so nice to see them I completely stopped worrying about detail, because once they were there, and smiling and cheerful, it didn’t matter at all, because they had come to see us, not to inspect the carpets.
It wasn’t quite dinner time, so we thought we might go out, and we all had a lovely trip to the park together, and Diane and I sat on a rock and talked, and all the men and the children played football in the sunshine and then climbed a tree, which Oliver loved, and by the time we got back home everybody was rosy and cheerful with shiny eyes.
They had brought some lovely sparkling pink wine and everybody helped to finish getting dinner ready, and I have no idea if it was nice or not, because I can’t really tell when I have been concentrating really hard on the cooking: but everybody ate a very great deal, and laughed, and did lots of the sort of talking that starts with: “Do you remember..?” and lots more talking about the way the world ought to be run, and it felt perfect, and left me feeling sleepy and warm and happy, and glad to have such interesting clever friends.
The picture on the top is the tree climbing. Actually there are five people in the tree, because Ritalin Boy was sitting on his father’s shoulders, and I know that there were because I took the picture, but you can’t see them. Lucy was the highest.
