We slept with the window open last night for the first time this year.
This is a nice thing to do when the weather is warm, and actually it was starting to feel quite warm by our bed time, which was at quarter past six this morning.
The difficulty is that when we go to bed, the dog stations himself on guard to make absolutely certain that nobody breaks in and upsets any of us.
Obviously he is very good at it because apart from people like Number One Son-In-Law and Ritalin Boy and other people we like who are not scared of the dog, we have never yet woken up to find that somebody has broken in to steal the taxi takings or murder us in our beds: but this time it was a bit tiresome.
Usually when we go to bed we have the window closed because it is cold, or else it is night and nobody is walking up and down the road: but it was day time really and after a little while there were lots of people milling about enjoying the sunshine, and every time anybody walked past the window and made talking noises or whistled or clattered a gate, he leapt to his paws and growled to make sure that they knew not to come in because of the scary dog on the end of the bed.
It was very handy, but not terribly restful, and I kept dreaming that there was a lion trying to get in and eat the children.
Lucy was going back to school today, having spent all weekend white and exhausted and trying to remember French and algebra and Mandarin and physics for her end of term exams next week: so when we eventually got up we went across the road to eat enormous pizzas as a way of compensating for my guilt at being absent parents for the rest of the weekend, and also as a belated mild celebration for Mark’s birthday.
Afterwards I went back to bed for a snooze before the trek back to York, and he went to work, and then Lucy and I set off.
It was a bit of a worrying journey, because I had been seized with a ghastly sensation of of unpleasantness, although with hindsight I suppose it could have been due to too much pizza for breakfast: and felt horribly anxious that we would be crushed to death in a hideous transport misadventure and never come back. It is a long way to York and all sorts of scary things could go wrong. I said a dramatic farewell to Mark, just in case, and then when I stopped for fuel the man behind the counter looked at me with concern and said: “You look tired. Don’t go on the motorway. Drive carefully.”
Of course this was no help at all, and I instantly imagined him telling a reporter from the Westmoreland Gazette how he had pre-warned me due to a remarkable premonition of my imminent demise, CAR SMASH VICTIM DRAMATIC WARNING EXCLUSIVE, which is the sort of thing that does well in the Gazette on account of the absence of proper news.
In the end I drove all the way across really carefully and slowly, which is not at all my habitual way of proceeding, my usual style of driving is fast and exhilarating with lots of overtaking of cautious people, which sometimes surprises taxi customers who do not expect the elderly granny who is driving them to be working up to an audition for Brands Hatch.
This meant that the whole thing took ages, and to my deep disappointment I didn’t see a single accident about which I could have said, with ghoulish satisfaction: “That could have been us. If I’d been driving a bit faster we would have been in that,” indeed, the A66 seemed to be entirely populated by people for whom driving does not at all supply an exciting feature of their daily adrenaline rush.
I dropped Lucy off and told her that I would probably still manage to love her even if she failed to get a place at Oxford and so she needn’t worry about her exams too much, although obviously we would prefer not to have to put it to the test.
I was bored with driving slowly and carefully then, because it takes so long to get anywhere, so I put my foot to the floor and hurtled happily back and still didn’t have an accident.
So there you go. Premonitions are rubbish.
