It is raining, a lot, actually a very lot, and I am struggling with the peculiar sensation of being temporarily unoccupied.
Oliver has come home, and has his friend Harry round for the night: they are playing something violent and unsuitable on the Playstation. They are laughing and shrieking very happily upstairs, and are not interested in me: but nevertheless of course cannot be left alone without a babysitter, so only one of us has gone out to work and that one was Mark, leaving me at home.
I am by myself, and I have got nothing to do.
I can’t go swimming, because I am babysitting.
I don’t need to spend ages getting my things organised for work, making a flask of tea and putting some peanuts in a bag and making sure I have got books to read and a box full of change and a phone with some charge and some tissues in case of a runny nose and some water in case the engine leaks again, and some more water in case I need a drink, because I am not going to go to work.
(NOTE: The two different sorts of water is an important issue, after I realised the other day that I was drinking out of the wrong bottle, which Mark had filled up from the watering can in the garden which is a repository for dead spiders and slugs, and then I thought I would prefer to be thirsty and felt a bit unwell.)
I don’t need to get anybody’s dinner ready because I have already made a stack of Oliver’s favourite pancakes and he is slowly consuming them with joyful not-at-school indiscriminate eating whenever he feels like it, helped along by Harry: and I have made sandwiches for Mark. I am not especially hungry on account of eating too many chocolate raisins and peanuts in the car earlier on, which is tiresome because they weren’t particularly nice and now I don’t have any room left to eat anything that I might have liked to eat.
I have responsibly checked our bank account and moved funds about to cover various potentially alarming things before they turn into disasters.
I have got bored with Facebook.
I have read all the interesting and useful, and then quite a bit of dull and useless, news about the election that I can read.
(Since it is all over now and my opinions are no longer of any interest to any political party anywhere it doesn’t matter anyway, and I might just as well let them get on with it ignored by me for the next few years because it only irritates me to hear them all squabbling.)
It is raining too hard to go into the garden and plant things, even if I didn’t need to have clean fingernails for Tuesday.
There isn’t any housework that desperately needs doing, except some dusting, which admittedly is getting a bit urgent, but is far too tedious to do. Nobody spends an evening off doing dusting.
The thing is, I don’t exactly know what I do want to do.
Most of my life is so very full up doing all of the things listed above, with a few additional extras like sewing on name labels and hanging up washing and cleaning the bathroom, that I don’t quite know what I do when I am left to my own devices. Usually if we have got some spare time we sit and chat companionably in the kitchen with one another and drink wine: and if we have got a lot of spare time we dig out one of the LoveFilm DVDs and watch that, usually whilst drinking wine or eating chocolate or even both.
I don’t think I should do that, though, because Mark isn’t here, and it will mean he will have a film to catch up on, and it is not supposed to be a good idea to sit and drink wine by oneself.
I am very good at occupying myself in the taxi, and am ace at reading library books and chatting to other taxi drivers and writing this diary and writing letters to Oliver: but I am not in the taxi, unlike all my library books, and there aren’t any taxi drivers here, which is nice, and obviously I don’t need to write to Oliver, because he is the reason that I am here anyway.
I am not sure that I like the feeling very much, and wonder if it is indicative that I have forgotten what sort of person I actually am when I have got a choice about it, which is a bit worrying.
I think of myself as being a Creative Type Person who has a Full And Productive Life: but on close examination, which I don’t usually do, but which is being forced upon me at this very moment, it is beginning to look as though what I really am is a person who has a life full of housework and driving taxis.
This is not at all the same, and even the kindest sympathiser can hardly call writing a diary creative, since I don’t actually invent anything, merely catalogue events as they take place. Really I suppose it is little more than a slightly elaborated version of got-up-had-breakfast-went-for-a-walk-it-rained-again, which may be interesting, especially when something exciting has happened like a blackbird eating a worm or something: but possibly not creative.
I could always pluck my eyebrows, or have a shower or something, but neither activity could be described as a hobby.
I am forced to conclude that in fact I may be a rather dull person.
I hope nobody has noticed.
