Mark carried on with the camper van restorative project today, and I took Number Two Daughter to the bank to arrange a link between our accounts. This is in order to facilitate emergency borrowing from each other when she has gone off to Japan and we are too far apart for any sort of satisfying recriminations to be possible.
That is, I was supposed to be taking Number Two Daughter to the bank. In the event Number One Daughter came along as well, and sat on a cupboard in the bank manager’s office making amusing observations about the family’s financial affairs whilst I tried to explain what we would like to set up.
After that they both buzzed off to the gym together in order to give Number One Daughter an opportunity to torment Number Two Daughter for a couple of hours whilst I tried to catch up on housework.
I am not in an urgent panic with the housework at the moment, although if you watch this space I have no doubt that I will be in one within the next week. The thing is that there is an awful lot that I need to get done before we have our holiday, and although at the moment I have got the sort of leisurely feeling that comes with pottering about doing things neatly, I think it will only be a very few days before it becomes apparent that I have completely misjudged. At this point I will become alarmed and grumpy and have to dash about frantically trying to remember passports and toothbrushes.
In between cash generating activity, today this has meant that I have been making ready meals in tin tubs to stick in the camper van freezer which can then be dumped into the oven for hasty reheating after a busy day of leisure. So far I have made two different types of fried rice, the sort that we like, and the sort that Oliver will eat, which is like ours except without any flavour.
I have made mayonnaise, some to come with us and some of which I left on the side in a jar for Number One Daughter, which duly vanished when she did, and I have made chocolate biscuits and some shortbread with caramel and chocolate on the top, which we all like but which I don’t bother to make very often because it is such a lot of washing up.
This took me almost all day, which doesn’t sound like very much now I have written it down, but seemed to keep me very busy for an awful long time, and I was just clearing up when there was a small squeak of: “Ganny!” from the end of the garden, and they were back, along with Ritalin Boy.
Ritalin Boy ate some cakes and rubbed the crumbs into the carpet. He had bought some new toy trains, one of which he left on the kitchen carpet and which I trod on in an excruciating moment shortly afterwards. He went upstairs and hid everything from my dressing table and came downstairs with a triumphant shout of: “Ha ha!” to make sure that I would know who to blame when vainly hunting for everything later.
Number One Daughter wanted to clean her car out whilst I made coffee. Casual enquiry led to the explanation that on her way up here on Friday they had been in heavy traffic on the motorway when Ritalin Boy somewhat inevitably needed an urgent wee.
Since they were unable to stop she had rather desperately handed him a disposable coffee cup and suggested that he avail himself of it. He had done so, and she had absent mindedly left it in the cup holder in the car and forgotten all about it, until today.
After the car had been parked in the warm sunshine for a couple of hours at the gym the scent had begun to get rather noticeable, and she remembered the incident and picked the cup only to discover that it had partially dissolved, presumably because Ritalin Boy’s wee is rather more corrosive than the products of Costa Coffee, and sprung a leak, and some fairly major disinfectant application had become necessary.
Neither Number Two Daughter nor I offered to help.
Blood might be thicker than water, but it is just not thick enough for leaky cups of wee.
