Getting up this morning so that Mark could go and do some job working for somebody else felt like the most outrageous violation of our personal lives.
In term times we get up and do school runs, but somehow that is because we feel like it, not because somebody in Kendal wants to open their business before the world has had breakfast.
Mark went anyway, because he has had jobs before, and actually is very patient about things like that. I said that he had got to ask them if he could be self employed, so that he doesn’t have to go when he doesn’t want to, and he said that he would in the sort of way that means he probably won’t.
Once he had gone it was still only eight o’ clock, and I was already up and dressed and on my own. I took the dogs for a forlorn walk in the rain around the Library Gardens, with all of us missing Mark, and after that I occupied myself busily doing important things like going to the bank and collecting Oliver’s tweed jacket from the dry cleaner, and remembering to buy milk.
It was a wet sort of day, the sort where the washing has to be hung over the fireplace and not on the washing line, and it doesn’t dry much whatever you do with it. I really felt like going back to bed, but this seemed like an unfair thing to do when Mark was labouring away at some place of Honest Toil, so I thought that I would be useful as well.
I did some sensible cooking. It is ages since I have cooked anything unless we have had visitors, so I filled an enormous pan with fried chicken and bacon and vegetables, and simmered it all for ages in red wine and cream and mustard and spices, so that we would have something to eat in hungry emergencies. Then I made a carrot cake for us and some iced buns for Oliver and Ritalin Boy, who are coming up tomorrow.
Number One Son-In-Law has been unexpectedly offered some work offshore again tomorrow, and hence his usability as a boy supervisor has been seriously curtailed. Number One Daughter, Mark and Lucy all have real jobs, and Ritalin Boy’s Other Grandma is in hospital being brave about some excruciating sounding surgery involving sawing a bit of her off and putting a plastic bit in instead, and hence is unlikely to be in the mood for entertaining Ritalin Boy: which leaves me.
I am not bad at babysitting, in that I can switch the PS3 on and make chocolate spread sandwiches, and Ritalin Boy can talk now, so we don’t have the awful guessing game that you get with pre-vocal children, where you have got to try and work out if they want a poo or a drink of milk and if you get it wrong you have got a howling child and probably a mess to clean up as well. I am rubbish at that.
Having Oliver home and Ritalin Boy joining him means that it is likely to be a busy week, and is going to take up a lot of time that would otherwise be spent in a taxi. We thought that we needed to earn as much as we could whilst we didn’t have any boy problems, so when Mark finished his day job tonight he came straight down to join me on the taxi rank to try and earn some real money.
The thing about a job is that they only give you the massively inferior sort of money that is just numbers on the online banking screen which never turn up in any case until about a week after you want them.
Taxi money is a much nicer thing to have, because it is solid and cheering to have a big roll of twenty pound notes, or even a small roll of twenty pound notes.
It is a much more sensible arrangement, because you get it straight away without having to hop from one foot to the other in an awful month-long wait. Also you can see immediately if you have spent too much of it, and you know then that you will have to stop spending it very shortly because it will all be gone. I find this very useful, because I am not naturally good at stopping spending money.
It is midnight, and we are on the taxi rank now. It is all very well having a real job, but it isn’t nearly as handy as this.
We will have some useful money when we go home tonight. Rather splendidly, though, we will have some numbers on the online banking screen at the end of the month as well, hurrah!
LATER NOTE: The picture is of the view from the back door this morning in the rain, which felt terribly dreary at the time, but which cheered up nicely later, and by afternoon was sunny and breezy and bright: but I forgot to take a picture then, because I was busy.
