Mark fell about laughing last night when I said, very bravely, that of course I would love to come with him to the railway museum, and it was only fair that we should do things that he likes sometimes.
He said that he couldn’t think of anybody who might make a less inspiring companion for looking at trains, and that I needn’t worry because he could easily wait until Oliver had grown up, that was the whole point of having a son.
I confess to being deeply relieved about this turn of events, because although of course I would have loyally accompanied him, and even pretended to be interested, I would have found it very difficult to make sensible remarks and not yawn.
Mark suggested we go and look at the museum and the shops and wondered if maybe I would like to buy some new make-up whilst we were there as mine is beginning to get a bit past it.
This is why I love him.
We have got Lucy at home for the weekend at the moment. She has put all of her clothes into the washing and has been wandering around in a onesie that doubles up as a zebra disguise, she has had one or two issues with the tail.
Having her home has actually made our lives rather quieter than before, because both dogs are devoted to her, and they have instantly and disloyally decamped to her bedroom where they can lie adoringly at her feet the whole time, watching her struggling through her maths prep.
She is at the ghastly stage of school life at the moment where the spectres of distant GCSEs are beginning to solidify rather alarmingly. She seems to be doing dozens of them, and all of them sound like a full-time pursuit in themselves.
It is splendid for holding a light up to my own ignorance, I am quite sure that once I knew what you were supposed to do with an equation when x was on both sides of it, but I certainly don’t have a clue any more, nor do I know what a divergent lens is, nor do I have an opinion on the gender politics practised by Odysseus, and I have never spoken a word of Mandarin Chinese anyway.
With this in mind we left her to get on with her own prep this afternoon and went outside to clean the taxis out. This is a bit of a tiresome chore, but important, it feels very horrible when the place where you work is full of bits of other people’s burgers and your own discarded chocolate wrappers and other remnants of late night picnics.
Mark washed the outsides and I did the insides, his was dreadful because of the dogs and the oily things that he does and mud from the farm, and also because he has been using the taxi for moving sacks of nicely rotted poo from the farm to the allotment.
When they were done we went to work, which is where I am now.
During a quiet moment in the taxi rank we discussed our adventures for the next few weeks, and realised that we have got another appointment at Oliver’s school coming up, the day after he goes back from his exeat. Since the camper van is not yet fixed and the iron could have been described as hot, I suggested that we looked at some more local hotels for another overnight stay.
I made the mistake of starting the Internet search whilst Mark was still in the taxi. He watched me for a few minutes and pointed out drily that a good deal of our holiday expenses might be saved if I just typed into the search engine the phrase ‘hotels, Richmond’, without the word ‘luxury’ in front of it.
I must remember to be more circumspect.
LATER NOTE
After I wrote the last words I was made terribly grumpy because in the intervening time between that paragraph and this one, an unspeakably vile and repellent human being was sick in my lovely clean taxi, and we had to rush home and spend a very disgusting half an hour scrubbing her horrible red-wine vomit off the seats, it was almost worse than Mark’s bags of decaying poo.
My faith in revoltingly drunk people was restored by the very next customer, who was equally drunk but in possession of a more robust constitution. He was not sick, and was so relieved that somebody had agreed to take him home despite his inability to stand or explain coherently where he was going, that he paid for a five pound fare with twenty pounds and refused all offers of change and staggered away telling me that I was wonderful.
The photograph is one that Mark took a while ago, of sunset over Windermere.
I thought this was nicer than taking a photograph of somebody being sick.
