We were woken up this morning by the phone ringing.
It turned out to be Number Two daughter, not so much ringing as employing the one-bell signal that indicates that she would like me to call her back in order that the cost of telephoning between Dubai and the UK is deducted from my bank account rather than hers.
I brought my phone back to bed and rang her back.
She was feeling very pleased with herself, as she has been offered a new job, this time in Japan, which sounds as though it was dreamed up with her personally in mind. It is for an organisation called Club Med, which seeks to employ youthful party animals who can also teach people to ski.
This description fits Number Two Daughter perfectly, so perfectly that Mark speculated that the job might have been created by a government programme seeking to provide gainful employment for a sector of the population which would otherwise have wasted their entire lives having rascally adventures fuelled by excess alcohol.
She is to be housed in the Hilton, and she will ski all day, eat all meals in the hotel, and alcohol, as much as she can drink, is included without charge. She will have riding lessons, use of the hotel swimming pool and spa facilities including outdoor hot tub, her flights are paid for and her role is to teach people to ski and then help them to have unforgettable parties at night.
Mark thought that she might as well put herself on the waiting list for a new liver now.
I thought that it sounds absolutely perfect for her. If it turns out that she is good enough at having parties then at the end of the winter they will send her to somewhere else to have parties there, they have suggested maybe Thailand.
She has always been very good at having parties, a talent which did not improve parent/child relations when she was in her teens. There was once an incident of an assault perpetrated on her by me after a an episode of partying and vodka vomit, the latter in the back of Mark’s shiny new taxi. He had had an emergency phone call at three in the morning and found her outside the local nightclub, where she had spent most of the evening and all of her money, instead of being at home babysitting where she had promised to be. This was immediately followed by a startling lack of remorse and indifference to parental opinion, which inspired me to an impromptu outbreak of violence.
We sat in bed having our coffee and being pleased with our family generally, all of whom are doing pleasing things with their lives. We had to get up after a while, so that Mark could take his taxi for its MOT.
It failed, obviously, but not on anything terrible, so he ordered a lot of bits for it and then neither of us wanted to have a working day, we thought that we would stay at home and do things together, so I pottered around the kitchen making biscuits and chopping up fruit for the Christmas cake, and Mark swept the chimney and painted the fireplace and re-installed the boiler.
It was a lovely day. We had the living room doors open to the garden to let the sunshine in, and I made shortbread and Brazil nut biscuits and some sticky confectionery that Oliver likes called Rocky Road. This was prompted by the sudden realisation that the children will both be coming home at weekend, it is the first exeat already, how quickly it has gone.
Lucy’s school sent us an invitation this morning, to gather for drinks and canapés and socialising at the Royal Geographical Society in London next week. Of course we can’t go, for a lot of reasons starting with not being able to afford the bus fare, but it was very nice to be asked. We both had a dreamy moment of envisaging ourselves in cashmere and linens and lovely scents, drifting around an expensive lounge drinking champagne, before we remembered that it would be on a Friday night, which is a busy night for taxis, so of course we would have to stay sensibly here at home, and drive taxis instead.
We will have to leave the partying to Number Two Daughter. We are just not wild enough.
NOTE: The picture is the burnt sugar tree in the Library Gardens when we went for our walk this morning. It is just beginning to turn yellow, and the first faint wafts of the astonishing candy-floss scent are just starting to be noticeable. It is gorgeous.
