Predictable

I have had the house to myself all day.

Mark has been over at the farm, helping to resolve some escaping sheep issues and also building a dry stone wall. His dog thought that it might be fun to chase a sheep, and has been in painful disgrace ever since. We will have to take her and shut her in a pen with a ewe with a new lamb, because if a dog is a natural born idiot, which this one is, then it is a sensible idea to make her afraid of sheep.

It has been such a splendid spring day. I have had all the doors and windows wide open, because of filling the house with clean sunshiny air, although this has meant that it has been a bit chilly for most of the day.

I have been busy, so it didn’t matter. I have done all sorts of virtuous things. I have hand washed some jumpers and ironed some shirts and cleaned Oliver’s room ready for his almost-upon-us Easter holiday; and then whilst the afternoon play was on Radio Four I retired to the kitchen, where I made some things to have hot in picnics, and baked biscuits.

I was so busy that I was not sorry when it came to be time to go to work and I could stop panting up and down three flights of stairs with washing and bin bags and the Hoover, and go and sit quietly on the taxi rank and knit for a while.

Mark was late, because of it being a complicated wall, and I had got plenty of time to drink tea and sit by the lake looking happily at the sunshine.

Mark joined me after a while, and we sat together drinking tea and telling one another the stories of our separate day. After a little while of this, and also a few customers, we decided that the evening had reached its quietest moments, which happen when everybody is safely in restaurants, sampling the wine and spreading their napkin on their knees and preparing to eat dinner, at which moment they do not usually want a taxi.

This is our cue to buzz off for a swim, so we abandoned the taxis on the double yellow lines, which you can do without worry at night, because of all the traffic wardens finishing work at five o’ clock. We retreated to the soothing tranquillity of the BeautifulMe Wellness Holistic Health Spa .

We thrashed up and down the swimming pool inelegantly for half an hour. Mark has still got Man Knee, and sometimes he has got to walk up and down instead of swimming for a length or two because his knee hurts. I look at this activity with patronising superiority and make sympathetic noises about it, which makes him scowl.

We have exactly the same pattern every evening, because I like things to be exactly predictable and familiar. When Lucy was very little and something unexpected happened she would shut her eyes and put her hands over her ears and shout that it was “wong, wong, wong, wong, wong,” which is what we all say now if something troubling happens. In a desperate emergency we follow it with her next line, when she used to open her eyes and glare at us, and say accusingly, “my life is wuined.”

Our lives were not at all ruined tonight, we had our perfectly predictable routine of forty five lengths up and down the pool, alternating front and back stroke, followed by the hottest sauna that we could bear, followed by the ice plunge and another ten lengths, then a scorchingly hot shower and a cold one to finish off in the changing rooms.

We had our picnic and some more tea on the taxi rank after that, and I am embarrassed to tell you that I fell soundly asleep at about half past eleven and didn’t stir until eventually I got a customer nearly an hour later.

It is two o’ clock now, and I am outside the nightclub, so not too long to go now. I can hear music inside, and people laughing on the balcony where they are allowed to smoke, and the evening is clear and still. Mark is reading his book in the car behind me, and I feel as though we have got a very nice life.

Goodnight.