Short entry

This is going to be a really short diary entry, because I am so very tired I can hardly keep my eyes open. I have got some ghastly earache-and-runny-nose disease which I imagine I caught from some French person, the place is always a hotbed of dreadful bacteria because of their inexplicable and insanitary habit of kissing one another all the time. Anyway it is making me feel grumpy and uncomfortable and I want to go to bed.

On top of this I have just taken Lucy back to school, which is in York, and a long way to drive there and back with a break in the middle to try and organise teenage laundry failures. I don’t normally notice the drive very much but I had a late night last night, and it was thick scary fog all the way back, the sort where you have got to follow the white line down the middle of the road because it is all you can see, and just to make it worse I was going too fast because I was tired and had had enough of driving and wanted to go home.

Of course all was well, because this is life and not an episode of Coronation Street, where obviously any tired ill person driving too fast through thick fog is destined for an awful accident. I didn’t at all get my comeuppance, and everything was fine: however in consequence of all of these tiresome events I am too tired to think straight and am going to go to bed in about five minutes and so this will be much abbreviated.

It has been a nice day, actually: the children dived into bed with us for our last morning together. Predictably, it became a riot, with the dogs bouncing all over everybody trying to keep the peace.

It was only Lucy’s last morning, Oliver doesn’t go until tomorrow, we won’t be all together again now until the exeat in three weeks, and then we will have Christmas, when Number One Daughter and her family of hooligans will turn up as well.

We talked about Christmas and decided it was all right to start feeling excited about it now. The children have got their birthdays before then, but they will be at school for those, and in any case really the French holiday was about as celebratory as it gets. Then when we eventually got up Lucy went off and packed her still-damp-but-clean-clothes, and Mark and I dashed about sorting things out for a bit, and he cleaned the cars out and I had a go with the big rotary iron, which I had forgotten about and which was brilliant fun, posting things in at one end and watching them pop out flatly at the other: like a mangle without any effort.

After that we went to work, because we had got to earn enough money to pay for fuel to get Lucy back to school, which we had pretty much managed by teatime, I know that this sounds rubbish but it is true. Then I took Lucy back, and we did her Business Studies prep and revised her physics and practiced her singing in the car on the way, so the time wasn’t wasted. The radio isn’t working in Mark’s car, which is what I was driving because mine is not working very well, and so I didn’t waste the journey back either but distracted myself from oncoming trucks in the impenetrable fog by continuing with the happy daydreaming project related to my so far utterly unsuccessful attempts to write a book. This cheered the journey up immeasurably although it may not get me much closer to the best seller lists in the immediate future, watch this space.

On that note my bed is becoming too attractive to be ignored, like the girl in the short skirt when a young man is on his fifth pint. Sometimes it is nice just to give in.