It is so wet and chilled today in the Lake District that I have popped back home from work to change my flip-flops for warm socks and fur-lined boots.
My feet are thawing slowly as I write, and wiggling a bit in their unfamiliar bondage of being encased in boots, having spent all of the summer becoming hard and flat and broad in the freedom of flip-flops.
In consequence of the rain it is quiet on the taxi rank, because of nobody going anywhere. This is a nuisance because of needing to earn some cash, but quite pleasant in that I have got plenty of time and space to sit here and think about nice things, like sunshine. Number Two Daughter tells us that it is cheap to go the places where you might be bombed by a terrorist, so we looked a few up, but it isn’t.
It is in any case the last day of our summer. Lucy goes back to school tomorrow, and we won’t be all together again for ages.
This makes me feel sad when I think about it, and guilty when I think of all the other exciting adventures her friends will have had over the summer, compared to Lucy’s three nights in Blackpool and indentured service in the Chinese restaurant every night for the rest of the time.
I had some idiot in the taxi going on about this very subject this evening, asserting confidently that money didn’t buy happiness, and there was clear evidence for this because celebrities were always killing themselves, and that poor people should just pull themselves together.
His wife was pushing one of the brand-new sort of pushchairs that will set your credit card back almost a thousand pounds. I explained courteously that there was a clear statistical link between poverty, crime and depression, and added helpfully that it was a complex issue, so I was not surprised that he had difficulty understanding it properly.
Before we reached their destination he was blustering nastily about all of the people that he employed who had got very little money and how they seemed to be perfectly happy, and I raised my eyebrows with carefully judged politeness and said: “Goodness.”
He was so cross that he didn’t give me a tip, which I thought rather defeated his own argument that money would not at all help somebody be happier and have a better quality of life.
In truth, I don’t really think that it has done any of us any harm to have spent the summer working and not lolloping about on sun-drenched beaches drinking cocktails. We have paid our bills, and ploughed lots of cash into the camper van, and had some ace nights together.
We have had some brilliantly funny midnight dinners on nights when we have finished early, all of us sitting together around the table and eating cheese and crackers and telling our stories.
We have had gorgeously happy times with the poopies, laughing at them and tripping over them and hugging them and stroking their beautiful soft fur.
We have been united in our enthusiasm for spending early mornings decently asleep, struggling out of bed for coffee at around the time when everybody else is starting to turn their thoughts to lunch. It has been lovely to start the days all together, assembling on our bed, sometimes with the poopies as well, to talk and laugh and listen to one another.
It has been a tiring summer, busy and wet and hard-working.
I would be fibbing if I said it was just as nice to be broke and at work as it would have been to have won the lottery and be in the Algarve, or on a cruise down the Nile, because it jolly well isn’t.
All the same, these short times of having the children at home, having Number Two Daughter about, they are brilliant, and I would also be fibbing if I said it hasn’t all made me very happy indeed.
I am not at all looking forward to them going away.
The picture shows the dogs having some father-son bonding time.
It is good to have a family.
