We had an early start again in order to get Lucy to her new job, the consequence of this being that I was so tired that I had to go back home at teatime to have a Little Sleep.
She had to be at work by half past eleven to do the lunchtime shift, and then back again in the evening for a second shift.
She was white and terrified when I dropped her off this morning. They didn’t answer the restaurant door on her first nervous tap, and she scurried back to the car as if they had gone out for the day and she was off the hook. I made her go back and knock again, and in the end a grumpy-looking chef opened the back door with a look on his face that said: ‘who the hell are you?’ so I left her to the hard knock school of working life and went home to get myself ready for work.
We had a cup of coffee in the kitchen whilst I made sandwiches and Mark wrote out a very lengthy shopping list for Asda tomorrow.
I hoped that this would act like a sort of magical charm, like the sort where you write out the name of the person you want to fall in love with you in charcoal and blood and burn it in a candle by the light of the full moon, and the next day trip over him waiting in a dreamy-eyed spirit of besotted enchantment on the doorstep.
The optimistic thinking was that if we named everything that we wanted to buy then somehow we would attract enough money on Sunday afternoon to pop across to Asda on Monday morning and fill the trolley.
Maybe we should have burned it in a candle. Of course we didn’t, we left it on the kitchen table to add more to it as we remembered other things: and in any case we need to take it with us as an aide memoire, although it is equally likely that we will forget and just leave it next to the fruit bowl. In any case it didn’t work, and we had the most rubbish afternoon possible on the taxi rank. I sat there from one o’clock until half past five with just a short break to collect Lucy from work, and earned a total of seven pounds, so actually she had made considerably more than I did.
I found her in a collapsed heap at the back door of the restaurant at the end of the lunchtime shift, work being a fairly unfamiliar experience in her pampered little existence. She tumbled into the car and groaned, and when I took her home she put her pyjamas on and went straight back to bed until the evening shift, much to my amusement.
Of course she has had a lovely time, and said they were very gentle and kind with her, even though she was a bit clumsy and spilled one or two dinners. She couldn’t take lunchtime orders at all, because all the customers were Chinese, and although she has learned some Mandarin at school it was just not up to: ‘two fried noodles but leave out the oyster sauce and we’ll have a side order of vegetable spring rolls and do you do dumplings with that?’, and I reflected cheerfully that if she manages to last out, by the end of the summer holidays she is going to be streets ahead with her GCSE spoken Chinese, not to mention about half a stone lighter and financially self-sufficient.
I took her back at teatime, crossly because I was late: and then Mark said I was a liability, so I went home and collapsed into bed, where I stayed completely dead to the world until Number One Daughter called during the evening to fill me in on her cheerful adventures and sporting successes and remind me that Ritalin Boy is staying with his Other Grandma in Ulverston and would probably be pleased to see me at some time. I have been reading a book about Mothers And Daughters on the taxi rank, which is very entertaining, it looks as though lots of people have daughters who ring them regularly to fill them in with unedited tales of rascally adventures to make their middle-class toes curl.
Mark is collecting Lucy. He stayed on the taxi rank whilst I was asleep and waited there until she finished work.
Maybe he will have made enough money for Asda.
