I am having anxiety.
In the end last night we gave up on the whole working thing at about half past two in the morning.
I felt terribly guilty about this, because of the holiday and the trousers and the underwear and so on: but Mark sat in my taxi with me outside the local nightclub for a few minutes and after a while I became aware that his snoring had just woken me up, so we gave up and went home.
I knew that this was a wicked idle thing to do when cash is so short, but fortunately it turned out to be not too bad in the end, because when we got up this morning Lakeside Taxis had paid us the money for the school runs into our bank already.
This was a huge relief although not exactly a surprise, because I had done some abject grovelling and begging for them to hand over the cash quickly, but it reminded me that we had actually made money at both ends of the day and so maybe were not really incorrigible undeserving idlers after all.
This is the stage of the holiday process when I always have the most dreadful worried feelings about it all, in the sort of restless twitchy way that you do when you know you are leaving soon, are not ready, and on top or that have got no hope of making more money quickly enough to satisfy your rapacious demands.
I reminded myself sternly this morning about the beggars in India and that the looming possibility of not having enough Euros to be able to ride down the Seine on a bateau should we feel so inclined, was hardly an economic catastrophe, but to no avail.
Mark is absolutely sanguine about everything in the way of a person who could summon cash at the flick of a spanner if he wanted to, at least if he was not so busy fixing the camper van, and said that the whole point of being in possession of a credit card is that if we run out of money it won’t matter until later, which is true, but terrifying.
Then he said it was like living with a sat nav, and laughed.
I always manage to get myself into this sort of state when we are going away in holiday, so much so that when it was first mooted both of the children said they only wanted to go if they didn’t have to be at home whilst I had my stress meltdown during the preparation process. In fact they have both avoided this quite tidily as Lucy is going to her grandparents’ house from Monday, and Oliver is still at school.
We will pick both of them up on the way to the port, and also drop the dogs with Lucy’s grandparents, a prospect which is also giving me cause for some worry, the thought of their sadly uncomprehending furry faces – the dogs, obviously, not the grandparents – when we drive away is almost too unhappy to be borne, because they have both been abandoned dogs in their little lives before, and are bound to think that the same terrible fate has befallen them again.
The thing is that there is still such a lot to do. After we have earned the money for the mortgage and the spending money I have got to make the curtains and put all our things in bags to take over to the farm. Mark has got to pick all the pieces of camper van up from the floor and glue them back on.
After that he has got to fix the heater, the fridge, the water heater and the hydrogen exploder, all of which are not working properly. Then we have got to give the whole thing a jolly good clean out and pack it up properly and remember our passports and everything the children want us to bring on their behalf, and the dogs’ dishes, and the phone chargers, and the spare loo rolls, and Mark’s emergency spanners, and his blood pressure tablets, and the tin of biscuits and the swimming costumes, and my bank card, and I think that my head is about to go the same way as the hydrogen exploder, which got hot and blew a fuse.
Despite the terrible worries it is very exciting that we will be going so soon. We have got Lucy at home now, so there is a resident daughter in the house again, at least until Monday, which is lovely, although obviously we can’t see very much of her on account of the frantic earning efforts. We had breakfast together this morning, though, which was such a happy start to the day, and she told us about school, which made us laugh, she is the only person I know who uses the phrase ‘jolly decent’ without even a hint of irony. It is going to be absolutely brilliant to have a whole week all together.
Hardly any time until Thursday now…
