Tonight’s post is being brought to you from a layby at the side of the A19 in Yorkshire, somewhere between Escrick and the A64 junction.
In fact we are in the camper van pretending to be gypsies. Mark is making the bed up at the far end and I am sitting with the dog telling you about our adventures.
It has been a very full day.
You may recall that I went to bed a little the worse for wear last night, and in consequence I was a bit fuzzy when I got up this morning: and unfortunately it turned out that there was an awful lot that we had got to do before we left.
Today was the day of Lucy’s play, and tomorrow is Oliver’s Sports Day and School Picnic. Both schools are a long way away, in Yorkshire and about fifty miles apart but nowhere near our house, so of course we had got to go and stay overnight somewhere in Yorkshire, which inevitably meant the camper van.
This meant that I needed to prepare tomorrow’s picnic today, and pack it carefully so that it would travel in the camper without going off or getting spilt or anything horrible going wrong whilst we travelled to Yorkshire for Part One of the outing.
This was challenging with a hangover, and Mark did the school run whilst I faffed about mixing things with mayonnaise, and trying to manufacture edible things that might still look appealing after a couple of days sitting in the camper van in Asda’s budget version of Tupperware.
It took ages but in the end we had a picnic packed, and also a fairly wide variety of smartish clothes, ready for me to flap about the camper van changing my mind about what I wanted to wear at the last minute, and some dinner to eat with my parents tonight, and the dog and a bit of a headache.
After all that I confess that I slept for most of the journey, and Mark bravely hauled the camper around the country roads without any support, moral or otherwise, from me: but by the time we arrived at our favourite layby near Lucy’s school, which is where we are now, I felt a good deal better.
My parents joined us, and we had a very splendid picnic on the picnic tables at the side of the road, much to the interest of everybody going past. This was everything a picnic should be and is an art we picked up in France, where they do picnics with an admirable enthusiasm.
We put a tablecloth on the picnic table, and opened a bottle of wine. I had made a huge tray of rice, with interesting bits mixed in, which we heated up in the oven until it was spitting hot and smelled spicy, and then we put it in the middle of the table and served big spoonfuls to everybody. Once we had all had second and third helpings we had carrot cake with cream for pudding.
This meant that by the time we rolled up at Lucy’s school we were feeling very round and contented and mellow, and thoroughly looking forward to the night, which was predictably brilliant.
It was a musical called Out Of The Woods, and since it is a girls’ school there were a lot of false beards and gruff voices. School plays are always great fun, because the whole audience is there to enjoy themselves completely uncritically, and will clap and cheer no matter what goes on in the stage, and everybody gets caught up in it and the evening just rolls along brilliantly.
We laughed a great deal, although I am not sure that we were supposed to, and indeed there were one or two moments which convulsed the entire house, including the cast, such as the death of Snow White, which may not have been intended to provide guffaws, but I suppose we weren’t the only parents who had had a drink with dinner.
The evening was rounded off in style by some rascal setting the fire alarms off just after it finished, and we all flooded outside to try and find the hockey pitch where we were supposed to be assembling. We milled about being lost for ages before it was discovered that it was a false alarm, but fortunately it had had the immeasurable benefit of getting Lucy out of the dressing rooms and into our company, because she doesn’t do rushing, so every cloud etc.
She has got tall again. She is tall and lovely and happy, and it was very hard indeed to have a quick hug and five minutes together before she had to dash off and go to bed, and we had to take the camper van and drive away.
We will see her again next week, but it is so very hard to leave your children all over the place like that, and sometimes I do miss them.
Oliver tomorrow.
