We slept late this morning, hardly disturbed at all by Number Two Daughter staggering sleepily out just after we had all gone to bed to go and play rugby.
Playing rugby was the thing she was getting up early to do, not what we had gone to bed for, obviously. Just saying.
We had suggested that she might be able to catch up with some sleep on the coach journey, they are playing away today, but she looked at us as though we were halfwitted and suggested that we imagine all the amusement an over-excited team of youthful rugby playing girls might have with a sleeping victim.
Since none of us thought she would look especially good with just half an eyebrow and rude words written indelibly all over her forehead she decided to make a flask of strong black coffee and just grit her teeth.
We did not get up at nine o’ clock to play rugby. We slept blissfully until twelve.
We had coffee in bed and thought about the world.
We got up at one.
We emptied the dogs and bought some things to put in picnics. Then we had some more coffee and thought about the world a bit more.
It takes a lot of time, this thinking about the world. We have got a great deal to occupy us.
Autumn is upon us and the children will be home from school next weekend. Oliver is bringing a friend home with him so we will have to drastically improve our standards of catering and boy-supervision. I do not in the least wish to have some sort of absent-minded neglectful moment resulting in the demise of the son and heir of some Russian plutocrat. That could end very badly all round.
This means that I should not be sitting about thinking about the world at all. I have got to do a very great deal before the week is over, starting with trying to remember what I have done with the children’s sheets and making their beds, also things like going to see whether or not Oliver remembered to flush his loo before he left. I am not looking forward to this.
It was all something of a depressing prospect, mostly because of not having time to do anything of a domestic nature at all, because obviously it is still weekend and so we had got to go to work.
We went and sat on the taxi rank and I occupied myself trying to work out a helpful timetable for the week.
We are going to need to feed and entertain the various adult visitors we are expecting, turn the house into the sort of place where it might be feasible to entertain the juvenile heir to a Russian dynasty, put the new engine in the camper van and also do normal things like doing washing and going to work and to the bank and the things that are good for us, like swimming a mile every day.
I hope Russians like beefburgers and potato waffles.
The picture was taken on the taxi rank this afternoon, because it made me feel like mists and mellow fruitfulness.
