It is very quiet in our house without any children.
We slept completely undisturbed until eleven this morning, which was pleasing. No matter how hard the children try to be quiet in the mornings, they are not, and the dogs bark their heads off whenever they think anything interesting might be happening in the house that we might like to know about.
It is Saturday, so of course there was nothing to be achieved from the day except going to work. We had an unhurried coffee in bed, and then there was nothing much to be done except to tidy up and make ourselves a day’s worth of picnic.
There was a letter from Gordonstoun telling us that they are going to write to Oliver’s prep school for a reference, so I jolly well hope he has been behaving himself. Mark went to collect his glasses from the optician, and after that it was the taxi rank.
In between customers I have been sitting gazing out at the lake and speculating idly about catering for some visitors we are having next week.
Lucy is being brought home from school for the exeat by the parents of one of her friends who are staying in the Lakes for the weekend.
I have rashly invited them to dinner during their stay.
In fact I have never met them, although they sound to be very nice. They appear to own some factories in the textile industry, live between their houses in Shanghai and Italy and just pop across to England to collect their daughter every now and again. They are staying at an hotel this weekend which is too smart to allow my taxi on to the drive.
I would like to remind the reader at this point that we are opportunist taxi drivers with a crumbly terraced house, scruffy dogs and an overdraft. I have an uncomfortable feeling that our visitors are going to be somewhat surprised.
When Lucy was much smaller one of the girls in her class was in between houses and her family rented a terraced house in Brighton for a few weeks whilst everything was settled. She showed the other girls the Google satellite picture of it.
“Goodness,” said one girl, looking at it, “doesn’t your house have a lot of doors?”
I am going to have to cook something which has got minimum capacity to go hideously wrong, because I am not at all bad at getting things hideously wrong when I get into a flap, and which is likely to be enjoyed by people who are familiar with good cooking, the sort done by master chefs.
In fact I am going to have to cook several somethings like that, because of course I ought to do puddings and starters and bread and so on. It would be dreadful accidentally to produce something that everybody had to be polite about.
Fortunately I think we have probably still got some fairly reasonable French wine, and there is always the decent cognac for afterwards, with any luck if we slosh enough good wine into them they won’t mind what they eat, it would be ghastly if they were teetotallers.
So far the master plan is to do a shepherd’s pie, because I know that I can get that right, and if I mess it up I can put it in the dogs and do another one, because I can do it the day before. Also I can shove it in the oven before they arrive and then spend the rest of the time just flapping about trying to find some glasses that look mostly like each other and sorting out the plates that haven’t got chips.
It is very exciting to be pretending to be the real middle class. Usually our guests are taxi drivers, who are gloriously raucous company, or family, who already know what we are like and would not be surprised to find the cognac served in sherry glasses. We will have to do this anyway unless we can borrow some brandy glasses from somewhere. I am not going to buy any especially for the occasion because we are broke and they still might turn out to be teetotal anyway.
The whole event is playing in my mind a good deal.
I expect you will hear more of my anxieties on the subject before it is done.
What an excitement to look forward to.
