I think that I have mentioned before that I have no idea how people manage to get their lives into the sort of order which enables them to be at work, polished and shiny and full of breakfast, by nine o’ clock in the morning.
We had to have a sort of attempt at this today, because we were covering a school run in an emergency for Lakeside Taxis, and so had got to have made a start on the coffee-drinking business by seven.
It is difficult to describe the sort of outrage my body experienced at being obliged to commence conscious activity in the middle of the night. It wasn’t even properly light, the world outside the window was a sort of murky grey colour, and nothing of any note was happening worth looking at.
Mark was so concerned by my lack of ability to become coherent that he suggested that I went back to sleep whilst he did the school run. I accepted the offer gladly, but in the event it turned out that drinking half a pint of extra strong coffee is not the best way to ensure a return to oblivion, so after ten minutes I got up.
It made for a very peculiar start to the day. I couldn’t do any of my usual morning things for ages, like the post office and the bank and the shopping, because nothing was open.
When Mark came back we had breakfast, and we agreed that he would go to the farm and finish mending the boiler, which still needed some last bits of welding doing to it, and that I would stay at home and do things like argue with the children’s mobile phone provider and put the washing on and visit the bank and other rewarding housewifely occupations. I was supposed to be doing Elspeth’s book keeping as well, but it was just too dreary to be filing receipts on a rainy day, so I shoved it all back under the desk and finished making my new skirt instead.
I was very pleased with it when I had finished, because I redid the bits that were too big and when I had finished I liked it very much, because I put it on my dressmaker’s dummy which is the same size as I am, and it hardly made it look fat with a big bottom at all, so it could wear it to go out without feeling self-conscious.
The sun came out in the end, so I could put the washing outside to dry. After that I sent some emails to my very patient accountant who seemed to be of the opinion that I have definitely told the Inland Revenue that I was employing people even though I wasn’t, and furthermore seem to have instructed them to deal just with me and not him, which seems to me to be an astonishingly unlikely scenario: I must have been drinking: so that little tangle is going to take some unravelling, and then it was time to get ready for work.
I had intended to be at work for three, but I just wasn’t organised in time, so I had to dash out and do the school run and then dash back again and finish doing things like filling the flask with tea and washing up the breakfast pots: and even though I had had an early start and hadn’t done hardly any of the things that I wanted to do, by the time I actually managed to get out of the door it was a quarter past five, and what was more, I was completely exhausted. I was quite sure that this was due to having to get up in the middle of the night. If I had a regular sort of day job I would be absolutely rubbish.
I don’t know how people make it happen. How on earth people manage to wake up and have a cup of coffee and get the washing hung out and their sandwiches made for lunch and their dogs emptied and still get to work for nine o’clock is a perfect mystery. I have been rushing about all day and it has still taken me until after teatime. If I had got to be at work for nine in the morning and then stay there all day I think I would have to get up at around midnight.
I didn’t really mind being late, because Monday is usually a quiet sort of day, and doesn’t start getting really money-producing busy until about eleven at night, because it is the night when hotel staff go out and drink a great deal before they all have their day off on Tuesday. Mark joined me at about seven, he has finished the boiler and it is ready to go back in, it is shiny and polished and painted and he thinks that it probably does not leak any more, which is lovely.
The next thing will be to start cutting up and hauling back the dry wood.
We will get round to it.
