This weekend is usually the busiest of the year.
This is the weekend where we have a final piratical effort to raid the last of the serious tourist cash before the high tides turn and everything starts drifting inexorably towards the chill and unfriendly shores of winter.
So far the outlook for the weekend quite as optimistic as it might be, due to the weather forecast which is promising rain, followed by showers, followed by more rain. I am sorry to say that I think very probably I would not come here for my holidays this weekend, partly because the only indoor dry activity available is visiting Peter Rabbit, which is about as appealing as babysitting.
Assuming that nobody else has looked at the weather forecast, though, which presumably happens quite often, because it always predicts rain and people turn up here anyway, we can expect thousands of people to arrive between tonight and tomorrow lunchtime.
From our point of view the object of the exercise is very simple: we have simply got to spend as many hours lurking on the taxi rank as we possibly can, hoping to ambush the maximum possible number of holiday travellers and rake in the maximum amount of cash, adding the extras, observing the double time hours, and amassing tips wherever possible, between now and Monday teatime.
At about four o’ clock on Monday afternoon all the tourists start to embark slowly and happily for home. Once they get there they have got several days gloomily to remember that the holidays are over, contemplate their overdraft in some astonishment, and look wistfully at their photographs of clouds over Windermere before their children go back to school next week.
By this point we will be back at our stronghold, quaffing celebratory wine by the gallon, emptying our cashboxes and deciding where to bury our haul. This will be the time for contemplating our own fortunes, and we will be somewhere on the spectrum between delight and despair, depending on the way the weekend has unfolded.
I like Monday night on Bank Holiday weekends much better than I like Friday.
However with this in mind the object of today has been to prepare the ship for the long three day voyage to seek our fortunes as well as I possibly could.
During Bank Holiday there is no time really for maintenance of any sort, we are all hands on deck. Even Lucy will be at work, and poor Oliver will be left walking the dogs.
We will all need to be able to dash into the house, eat quickly and rush off again. We need plenty of food that Oliver can easily reheat himself should he get unexpectedly hungry during the periods of abandonment by his callous and indifferent parents, and that Lucy can fill up on at the end of her working shift: and we need cheese and crackers and cooked meats to mop up the red wine last thing at night when we stagger home after the last night club has emptied its revellers on to the streets.
So it was a day of setting things in order before the excitement of the weekend. I have cooked a stack of pancakes, and a huge tray of sausages, and made Brazil nut biscuits and mayonnaise and mixed creamy blobs of it with tuna to go on sandwiches.
After that I cleaned, unwillingly assisted by Lucy, whose highlight of the day was to fail to realise that the washing on the floor next to the basket needed to go into the washing machine just as much as the things inside it. This was irritating, especially since most of it was hers, and then of course it didn’t get washed, and my joy in my perfectly clean house was marred by secret knowledge of smelly things hiding at the bottom of the washing basket
We scrubbed and polished and hoovered. We chucked out the dead flowers and brought fresh tansy and lavender and sweet peas in from the garden. We cleaned the bathrooms and swept the hearth and the stairs: and tonight I went off to work about as ready as I could be, encouraged by the thought of a fragrant clean house to come home to in the dawn. Lucy went back to bed to eat sausages and pancakes and complain about child abuse.
Three days to go.
