And so we are back at Saturday.
We worked late, and eventually we were woken this morning from a sort of numb oblivion by Lucy’s school ringing up. I was almost grumpy with them, but fortunately noticed in time that it was half past eleven and realised that I would be being unfair if I were to accuse them of calling at an unsociably early hour.
They were being lovely and only wanting to talk about Lucy’s general virtue and wonderfulness, so I listened happily for a while whilst Mark made coffee and neither of us thought that we ought to go back to sleep then, so we had a peaceful coffee in bed and talked proudly about the children and mused about the day ahead, and then got up.
It was ace to come downstairs this morning, because in a fit of domestic virtue I made a Chinese sauce yesterday, and marinated a chicken in it. It was a splendidly aromatic mixture of spices and sugar and tomatoes and soy sauce and vinegar and chillies, and last night before we went to bed I shoved it in the oven on a really low heat. This morning the house smelled oriental and lovely, and the chicken was cooked to perfection and falling off the bones, to be eaten stickily with our fingers in the early hours of the morning with a glass of wine when we finally get in from work.
The time we are actually at home on Saturdays is usually boringly occupied in getting ready for work. When we go to work at weekends we have usually got to stay there for about fourteen of fifteen hours, in order to get the full spectrum of the market, from the exhausted tourists in the afternoon to the incapable drunkards at the end: so there is a great deal of preparatory faffing about to be done. In fact I prefer the latter type of customer, they involve less conversational effort and are occasionally so intoxicated that they are hugely benevolent with their tips, and generally no trouble as long as you manage to get the door open before they are sick.
So I had flasks of tea and sandwiches to make for the long haul, and Mark cleaned the cars out, because of course after a week of hurtling round the Lake District with us having picnics in them in between customers, they were fairly revolting. Also it is never nice to get in a taxi where several drunk customers have been eating chips and tomato sauce kebabs on their way home along windy roads the night before.
I mixed garlic and parsley out of the garden with dried tomatoes and cream cheese and rolled fluffy blobs of it up in slices of ham and covered them in ground pepper. I made cheese rolls filled with roasted ham and home made mayonnaise and rocket, and packed up almonds roasted with rosemary, and chocolate and peppermints and fruit juice, because it is much more cheerful to be in a taxi if you have got nice things to eat when you are hungry.
After that I pegged all the washing out on the line where it billowed gorgeously like sails, and by the time it started to rain a little it was almost dry and I could bring it in.
The last job before work was to bath the dog, who had also become pretty revolting. He loathes this. He is very good about it once you actually get him into the bath, and stands there miserably lifting his paws on request, but if he sees me getting his towel out he hopes that there might still be some escape, and goes and hides under the table where he sits and trembles until one of us hauls him out. In the end Mark captured him and brought him upstairs and he pushed his nose into Mark’s armpit in the hope that if he couldn’t see the bath then it wouldn’t be true, but it was, and he smelled very much better straight away, although looked rather like Mrs Tiggywinkle.
I took him to blow dry in the wind round the Library Gardens, and then after that it was time to go, which was all right because for once the dog was not at all sorry to see the back of us and curled up grumpily on the sofa and refused to look at me at all when I said goodbye.
In fact he didn’t forgive me for ages. We pop back at intervals to socialise with him during the evening so that he doesn’t get lonely, but he didn’t at all want to socialise tonight, and has just turned his back on me huffily when I have visited him.
It was nice to have a clean car and a picnic. I have listened with interest to Weekend Woman’s Hour during the afternoon, and to the late night news after it had gone dark. I have got a splendid library book about film making in the Second World War, which I am enjoying very much, and another one for a change about Chinese politics.
There are a lot of people in the Lake District at the moment, although a lot of them are wearing woolly hats and overcoats: and the weather keeps having surprising bursts of rain which makes people dash for shelter or taxis, which is handy.
I am on the taxi rank now. I have drunk my flask of tea and eaten some of my picnic. I have taken a lot of grateful wet people back to their hotels, and now I am waiting for the stag and hen parties to come collapsing cheerfully out of the pubs to spend the last of their money in getting back to their guest houses.
It is not a bad way to spend a weekend.
