Spring Unclean

It has been a lovely day in absolutely every way.

I crawled into bed last night with such exhausted relief I didn’t even notice Mark following me a few minutes later. Bed time is such an ace part of the day. I like the sheets to be very white and smooth, and flatten them with the rotary iron after I have washed them: and we light bluebell-scented candles in the bedroom whilst we are showering, so that we can go to bed in the lovely soft candle light and gorgeous smells. Last night I collapsed between sheets that smelled of lavender water and the garden, sighed with the absolute happiness of a splendid world, and instantly fell into oblivion.

The telephone rang at about half past ten this morning, startling us both into wakefulness. It turned out to be my parents, who had woken up to the sunshine and thought they would come and see us.

This was a very pleasing surprise, they live absolutely miles away and so we don’t see them nearly as much as we would like to. I returned to bed with the news, and we wondered briefly about getting up and having a hasty spring clean, but decided not to bother. Mark went off to bring some coffee back to bed, and we looked happily out at the sunshine and did nothing at all for half an hour instead.

Of course in the end we did get up but we didn’t do any spring cleaning. We did some washing and put the kettle on and unearthed some clothes for Lucy, who objected that she had not unpacked anything because her master plan had been to spend the entire holiday in a dressing gown: and therefore she was unprepared to receive visitors.

She had not been dressed for very long when they appeared, and of course they did not at all think that we should have spring cleaned first, so it was nice that we had decided to have a quiet half an hour instead of running about dusting things and panicking.

It turned out to be a lovely day. We told them all about our adventures, first over coffee round the kitchen table, and then over enormous pizzas in the sunshine at the little bistro across the road. Mark and I recklessly had red wine, which was rascally because of course it was our breakfast. We sat outside, which we could do because the bistro has got large awnings with heaters underneath them, and felt very continental even though we had got to keep our coats on.

It was a splendidly happy day, and we were sorry to see them go at the end of the afternoon. My mother was very polite about my hat, she can actually knit, and so only laughed a little bit at some of my more obvious mistakes, but said kindly that it was a lovely hat, and that she would not even mind wearing it, which was very high praise. I felt very pleased with myself, because it is always nice when your mother thinks that you are doing things well even if you are fifty and really should not mind any more.

When they had gone we realised that we were yawning our heads off. We thought that it might be that we have just worked far too hard this week, but really it was probably because we had large glasses of wine for our breakfast. We tidied up and went back to bed, where we slept peacefully even though the windows were open and the dogs growled every time somebody walked past outside.

In the end we didn’t get up until we were starting to be late for work, although it didn’t really matter, because we had had such a nice day. We left Lucy with instructions that she was not to do any more schoolwork but was to spend her evening on Facebook, listening to pop music and sending photographs to online paedophiles, because we know what teenagers are supposed to do when their parents are distracted. She sniffed and said that if we didn’t mind she would prefer to get on with her physics prep.

We went to sit on the taxi rank with a flask of tea. We had eaten so much pizza that we didn’t even need to take a picnic, although by ten o’ clock I found I had accidentally eaten almost a whole bag of jelly babies, and was beginning to feel a bit unwell.

See you tomorrow.