We were woken up this morning by the sound of a dog crying, which startled us both into instant wakefulness: but it turned out to be outside in the road, and both of our dogs were fast asleep next to us.
In any case I had woken up in a vaguely anxious frame of mind, having been woken up several times in the night with anxieties about Oliver’s vests being grey instead of white. This is not because I have messed up the laundry but because they are that colour in the wild, as it were, and the school list very clearly specifies white.
I was so worried about it that when I got up I rang school and spilled out my anxieties to the kindly secretary. She thought that probably they would not expel him over it: and whilst I was in the office I found a message on the computer from an old schoolfriend, telling me that they were visiting Windermere and would like to catch up.
I had already known this but had forgotten, and was instantly thrown into such a state of dilemma that I had to think about it all the way around the Library Gardens, because we usually work on Monday nights.
Mark listened and said that we can work on any night we like but hardly ever see our friends, so we rang them up and suggested they came to dinner.
Once the decision to shirk had been made then I was free to feel excited and happy, and suddenly I was both, very much indeed.
It was too late and I thought I was probably too disorganised to do any truly imaginative catering, so we thought we would put pasta and cheese in the oven, and I made a carrot cake.
This all sounds very simple, but actually somehow it took me all day, even with Mark helping. I don’t know how I managed to make quite such an enormous mess, but I did, and it took Mark hours and hours of patiently washing up at the sink.
In fact it was a jolly good thing to have been doing, because it quite took my mind off being sad about missing Lucy, whose Mandarin coursework, incidentally, we couldn’t find anywhere, despite a thorough hunt which started at the loft and worked downwards, hoovering as we went. I was jolly glad that we had done so much cleaning this week, how dreadful to have visitors when you are dusty.
We weren’t dusty, and even if we were neither of our visitors remarked on it, how fortunate to have polite friends. It was lovely to see them, we have seen very little of one another since schooldays, and they are sensible and witty and have had interesting adventures in their lives.
Of course by the time they arrived I was longing for a drink, failed completely to taste any of the dinner, and then drank too much. This happens to me occasionally, somehow when I have tried really hard to cook something properly it becomes neutral when I eat it.
It does not taste horrible, and it doesn’t become like sawdust the way people describe food in moments of personal angst in books sometimes: at least I assume it doesn’t, not being a gourmet of sawdust. It just doesn’t taste of anything at all, which I suppose would be an advantage if I had truly messed something up, because I wouldn’t know. There was some pasta left over at the end, I shall have to try it tomorrow.
They brought some very nice fizzy wine with them, which I liked so much I have saved the bottle to make sure I can remember what it was next time I go to Booths. They also brought some olives, because of having a market stall where they sell them: and I was very pleased indeed, because I love their olives, and they are too far away for me to buy them often.
Not only did we have a very happy evening, but when Number Two Daughter came in from work she said that it had been rubbish and we hadn’t missed anything at all: so the decision to shirk turned out to have been exactly the right one.
What good fortune.
