We dragged ourselves out of bed for the school runs this morning only for them to be unexpectedly cancelled as we were setting off.
We were up then, so we thought we might as well just get on with the day’s events anyway, so we fed the children and made sandwiches, and Mark and the dogs and the children went off to the farm, and I listened joyfully to the silence for a while, and then went back to bed, where I would have been for considerably longer had it not been for a visiting friend.
I was very pleased to see her, but obviously can’t do gossip and coffee at the same time as being asleep, so I got up and chattered happily for ages and caught up on all of her adventures, which I didn’t know about because she doesn’t write an online diary. She didn’t need to ask about mine, but I told her anyway, because I didn’t want to be left out.
After she had gone I rushed off out to work, and hung around the taxi rank listening to taxi gossip for the afternoon, with occasional forays out into the wider world when customers presented themselves, but mostly it was a quiet sunny afternoon, enlivened by Lucy’s Clockwork Angel book, which I am reading whilst she reads Pride And Prejudice.
I am quite sure that I would have loved this if I were younger. Indeed, I recall that did love some fairly similar yarns, full of Mythical Creatures and romantic handsome vampires, although admittedly short on astute observation, original wit and social comment. I am quite enjoying it now, in an elderly and cynical sort of way.
Lucy certainly enjoys them, and in fact I have discovered that in her spare time she writes fan fiction, which is online sequel-writing to popular books. I was not a little put out to discover that her readership is considerably larger than mine, which suggests unsurprisingly that people may be keener to read about vampires than taxi drivers.
She goes off to the Ardeche on Sunday, probably with her unread copy of Pride and Prejudice stuffed in the bottom of her suitcase. We have slowly been getting her things packed to the best of our ability, not helped much by me being out at work most of the time, and by her being vague, not terribly organised, and firmly expecting a Happy Ever After to be the result of everything she does whether she remembers to pack a sleeping bag or not. I hope she turns out to be right.
She announced tonight that she needed a new swimming costume. She has got one here, of course, but it is hopelessly small, and so I had told her that she would need to take one of her school ones, both of which, it turns out, she has lost.
In consequence, tomorrow we will have to go and buy a new swimming costume. You may remember that we have been shopping once this week already. I can hardly wait to repeat the experience.
I am envious of her foreign travel and to her horror I suggested wistfully to Mark that we might take a trip down there and join her, but she was saved when I remembered that I hadn’t managed to afford to renew my passport and so even if Mark managed to fit an exciting new explosive device to the camper van so that it ran on water instead of diesel we still couldn’t go. This is tiresome, because even if we didn’t go to the Ardeche, holidays in Tunisia are so cheap they practically give you a tenner to go now, and I have never been to Tunisia.
In short I am now longing for a holiday. I would like to pack the camper van and chug away into the sunset, or the sunrise, doesn’t matter, but sun something. We can’t go abroad, because the dogs haven’t got passports either, and I don’t really want to leave them behind, apart from sometimes, when they are snoring on our clean sheets, but there is plenty of nice England. Boris Johnson won’t let the camper van into London, so we will have to go somewhere else.
Somewhere else will probably turn out to be Number One Daughter’s garden again.
What a good thing it is to have daughters.
