This is going to be a very short post because you will not be at all surprised to hear that since it is Sunday I have been drinking.
Not spectacular drinking with karaoke and kebabs, but the sort of warm mellow drinking that started with a glass of wine with dinner after I had got home from work and all of the children were in bed. After that I felt so relieved and contented and cheerful that the bottle of wine was half gone before we even noticed that we had opened it.
We woke up this morning after a couple of hours sleep to plead with Ritalin Boy to eat bananas and cake and just watch the SpongeBob DVD just for a little while, just a bit longer, and managed to gain about an extra twenty minutes. After that we sat in bed with gritty red eyes and tried to steam them back to freshness with coffee. Mark took Lucy to work and we tidied up and then I went down to the taxi rank and Mark tried to fix his back light and couldn’t, probably because of being half asleep.
That was our day in a nutshell.
After that it was just taxis until it was dark, and we came home to eat pasta and Mark bought a bottle of wine from the Co-op which was reduced to four quid, and gave us a burning sensation as it went down, but we drank it anyway. Then I remembered that I had failed to update you on my adventures, and so here I am. Mark is washing up.
It is really quite lovely to be sitting here in the quiet of the evening, well fed and slightly tipsy on cheap wine. We have got a house full of children. Ritalin Boy is asleep in the loft. On the floor below him Oliver and Harry have had their bedtime story and are curled up underneath camouflage-patterned quilts, and Lucy is in her bedroom inexplicably but determinedly teaching herself to speak Korean. I am in my office on the middle floor and Mark is downstairs tidying the kitchen. It feels warm and brightly lit and perfect: as if it were a dolls’ house, and somebody might just open the front.
It has been such a very busy weekend. We started on Friday and apart from sleeping it is what we have been doing ever since: we work an awful lot of hours in the summer because of the making hay principle, and it has been splendid, the Lake District has been bursting with people. We can put some money in the bank tomorrow and maybe going to France in October could really happen.
It was difficult to concentrate this weekend because we had been invited to two birthday parties, both of which we would have loved to go to, and also to Number One Daughter’s house, where we could have slept for a week in the garden in the sunshine: so we had to keep encouraging each other and remembering about school fees and all the other good things we do with the money when we have earned it. In the event it has paid absolute dividends, it is lovely to be at home tonight with a glass of wine and a clear conscience and the shining satisfaction of having Done Our Duty.
It is over now, and I am going to cut this short and go to bed where I think we would sleep through a nuclear blast.
It is a very satisfactory world.
