We had the usual family gathering in our bed this morning, during which we wondered if the reason that all of the dogs like Lucy best is perhaps because she never picks them up and pretends that they are a machine gun.
Number Two Daughter points them at people and fires imaginary rounds of bullets and then laughs a lot. I think that maybe the dogs don’t really understand why it is funny.
They have abandoned us to spend every spare minute sitting at Lucy’s feet, not being machine guns.
I imagine that this is a fairly untaxing activity, since Lucy appears to be fully occupied in not going to work and not doing her prep at the moment. She spent all of yesterday in her pyjamas watching a green-haired person, improbably called Jack Septic Eye, on Youtube and telling me that she needed to rest after the exhaustion of spending a whole half term revising for her GCSEs.
She refused my suggestions of going swimming or to the gym this morning, and declined Mark’s suggestion that she paint some pictures on the camper van, made herself a pot noodle and some coffee for breakfast and retired to the company of Jack Septic Eye.
In the end I insisted that she did something which resembled activity, so she stuck her earphones in and went off for a walk. She came back much refreshed and said that it had been splendid, and maybe one day she would do it again, and ate another pot noodle, this time with a tomato to ward off scurvy.
Number Two Daughter did go off to the gym, and came back and had eggs for breakfast. I was already in the middle of a mountain of washing up, so this was all right. Then she brought an assortment of skis and snowboards into the living room and started arranging them in a bag ready to be transported to Canada. There are some snowboards which she does not want to take with her. I think she intends to leave them in the loft, maybe they will come in handy for something, perhaps on bricks they could be shelves.
She filled the enormous bag with the skis and everything else she could squeeze into it and then shoved it under the coffee table. It sticks out a couple of feet into the living room, but it is only until Monday so this will be all right as well.
I did the washing up and the washing and then carried on with making curtains for Number Two Daughter’s Canadian camper van.
They are the first curtains of her own. We had to have a short explanatory lesson about the way curtains worked as it had never occurred to her that there was a tried and tested methodology for attaching them to rails. Obviously she was aware that windows had both curtains and rails, but how the two things managed to maintain a productive and mutually beneficial relationship had never before been of any interest to her.
I hope she manages all right. The thing about being a grown up is that there are lots of little surprises like that about life.
Oliver comes home tomorrow.
Number Two Daughter leaves on Monday.
It is going to be very quiet without her.
There will be nobody to machine gun us with an automatic dog.
