I am feeling recklessly, wickedly happy.
We have booked ourselves a two night stay in York next week.
The first reason that this is reckless is that of course we can’t at all afford to do this. We are so broke at the moment that we can hardly afford to buy bread and milk. We are the newly penniless, the undeserving poor. It is January in the Lake District and for the last fortnight we have earned about a hundred and fifty pounds between us, and I don’t care at all.
I am utterly and completely fed up with looking out at Windermere in the rain and the gloom. I am fed up with waiting for hours and hours to get to the front of the taxi rank and then getting a customer who hops in and then says chirpily: “I’m afraid I’m not going very far,” and then expects me to smile and be lovely about it.
Actually we have only provisionally booked it a little bit. It was on a website that lets you book it and then cancel it on Monday if it turns out that you don’t earn enough money over the weekend to cover your bills and have a bit left over, so we did that because that gives us plenty of time either to earn some money or buy a lottery ticket.
The second reason that this is reckless and wicked is that Mark and I hardly ever go anywhere without the children. We have had the occasional night out, when we have been invited to things, which might have been scheduled when the children are away, but we do not very often deliberately and recklessly book a whole two night break in which the children do not feature at all.
They do feature in it a bit, actually, because the last day of it is Friday which we have handily timed for Oliver’s exeat so that we can pick him up on the way home thus saving ourselves a journey.
They do not feature in it in that we do not have to schedule a single activity which they will like. That is an optimistic statement, anyway, because they almost never like doing anything that describes itself as being suitable for families. If they allowed children into films depicting hideous undead massacres and naked ladies I have no doubt that Oliver’s attention would be entirely captured, but anything else and they are completely and vocally bored.
They are the only children of my acquaintance who have got to be cajoled into spending a day on Blackpool Pleasure Beach. We had annual passes for this marvellous assembly of elderly amusements for several years, and the children were not at all thrilled by it.
Mark and I were thrilled. We had some lovely weekends eating doughnuts and riding on the Alice In Wonderland Ride and the Wild Mouse. Lucy once argued that rides made her feel sick, the colours were ridiculous, and she would rather stay in the camper van and get on with her homework. Oliver used to bargain that he would go if he had got to but he only liked the maze and the table hockey, so he only wanted to do those.
Faced with this lack of enthusiasm it makes family outings something of a test of our determination to have a jointly lovely time. Mark won’t go near the local zoo in Dalton, which makes him furiously angry every time he thinks about it, Cumbria is a bit short of fascinating historic houses, and anything outdoors is excessively damp at the moment. Oliver hates ice skating, Lucy hates guns. The list of unsuitable activities is very long indeed.
Therefore it will be absolutely brilliant to go and do some things just because we like the idea, and not to have to spend the preceding half an hour explaining to the children exactly why they are in compulsory attendance for some non-voluntary family fun.
I have got all sorts of lovely ideas for the visit. We are going to stay in an hotel, because the camper van is still not working, and it is a gorgeous thought that we will be able to take as long as we like over cooked breakfasts and large dinners. We could even drink wine in the bar in the evening, because we will not be supervising tooth cleaning or reading bedtime stories. We could visit Hotel Chocolat and the Castle Museum, although not the Jorvik museum, because it is still closed.
Mark has just been to see me in my taxi.
He said how lovely it will be to go to York and to do things that we like.
He wants to go to the Railway Museum and look at trains. Trains.
Of course, there is always the possibility that we won’t be able to afford it anyway.
I might not be as devastated as I thought I would be.
