We finished work early last night and drove excitedly down to Manchester to the airport.
We were not exactly going to the airport itself, but staying next door to it in an hotel in order to facilitate meeting Number Two Daughter off an aeroplane early this morning.
We were very excited, mostly because it was an adventure with hotels in, which is my favourite sort. I love the feeling of being at the hub of a huge centre of population, love the traffic and the street lights and the fact that you can buy a kebab at three o’ clock in the morning if you feel like it. Also I love airports, which are thrilling gateways to places like Bengal and Johannesburg and Nairobi and Toronto, the starting point for so many stories, and when you come back you will be a tiny bit changed for ever.
Also we were meeting my parents there so that we could all catch up on Number Two Daughter’s traveller’s tales over breakfast as soon as she arrived, which meant that we had a good chance that she would still be sober.
It is an inevitable fact of life that once all her friends hear that she has arrived back in sunny Windermere she is swept away in a noisy crowd and encouraged to drink and tell Middle Eastern stories, like Scheherazade, and behave in a rascally fashion.
In consequence of this, our encounters with her on her visits home usually involve accidentally bumping into her when she is either creeping guiltily upstairs late at night, or sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and groaning at lunchtime.
This makes me feel the classic parental combination of cross with her, and amused by her suffering, and hopeful that she will grow out of it, and relieved that I have grown out of it myself. I am pleased to say that I very rarely crawl out of bed at lunchtime any more, wishing that I could die before the hangover got any worse and before I remembered exactly what it was that I did to get it.
I put on a new T-shirt and my new sleeveless body warmer which I have been saving for a special occasion, and which you might remember I had some difficulty in obtaining. An unexpected consequence of this was that I was absolutely boiling hot during the whole trip. It had not occurred to me that my old clothes had become thinner during the seven or eight years that I have been wearing them, but obviously they had, because the lovely new body warmer was like wearing a sleeveless blanket.
After a while I became quite pink in the face. This is an experience I have not really had since I was a teenager, when it could be brought on by a rude word or an interesting thought: but these days it is more likely to be after a helping of brandy out of Mark’s emergency hip flask, and probably most noticeable around my nose.
It was ace to see my parents, who had joined us for the occasion, and we had a pleasing evening in the hotel bar, catching up on news and then being too tired to stay up later than ten o’ clock. Mark and I had thought that we might have baths, because of the hotel hot water, but in the event we were just too tired and collapsed into bed.
The alarm went off in what felt like the middle of the night, and we had some truly horrible hotel coffee, with the sort of hotel milk which they leave on the tray in those minute pots which tip a tiny dribble of milk into your cup, so we used all six, and all six of the sachets of coffee as well, which helped, and then we had thought we would walk round to Terminal One, but in the event we stayed in bed too long and so it turned into a slightly breathless, and very undignified jog-trot.
The plane arrived on time, and there she was, grinning and waving and shivering in the chilly English morning like the dogs after a bath.
She has got a lopsided haircut and a peculiar new tattoo on her leg, and it is very lovely to see her again after all this time, it has been a whole year.
We spotted her this evening when we were on the taxi rank.
She is going to feel horrible tomorrow.
