Holiday’s end

I have no idea why I imagined that I might be able to dash off a thousand words tonight when I arrived home at around one in the morning having polished off half a bucketful  of best red wine.

I can’t now remember how I arrived at that conclusion.

The thing is, it is now two in the morning, I am completely and absolutely intoxicated, having had a busy day and drunk far too much, and the master plan was that I would write my diary whilst Mark was in the shower.

How easy these things look at three o’ clock in the afternoon.

Right now I can hardly bear to look at the computer screen because of the eye-wrenching brilliance. Drink is a terrible thing.

However I shall do my very best under a set of unpromising circumstances, please appreciate whatever drivel I come up with and make some allowances for a complete idiot.

It has been our final Christmas holiday celebratory day. This was marked by the last of our wonderful glory-flights followed by dinner at our friend Kate’s house. The first involved the children, the second did not.

The idea of today’s flight was that Mark and I would fly whilst the children took photographs and made excited noises from the back seat, this being the point of a whole-family Christmas celebration. From Lucy’s point of view this was brilliant, she had already decided that a career in aviation was probably not for her, and she sat in the back and actually fell asleep during Mark’s thrilling tour around the skies.

Oliver, however, was a different matter, and he spent the night agonising over the things that he might have done differently, so that obviously he had to have another go today in order to find his confidence and put things right. In fact this worked brilliantly, and today he was a different boy, proud and confident in charge of the aeroplane, steering in and out of cloud banks with ease, and chatting happily to the instructor whilst I sat quietly in the back and took photographs. This was perfectly all right, because he was so tremendously thrilled about the whole thing.

It was an ace flight. The flying instructors were impressed that anybody should have such good fortune as to have two such brilliant weather days together. Clearly it is just not possible to explain a long and intricate relationship with the Weather Gods, who understand perfectly when it is not a time for playing amusing rain games, so I just smiled and nodded and agreed that we were jolly lucky.

Mark and Lucy set off first, and Oliver and I some time after. The instructor said that Oliver could go where he liked, so he took us west over the Pennines and then to the north. We saw Mark and Lucy’s plane, and our instructor, who was a splendid chap, thought that it would be a good idea to pretend to be Bomber Command, so we chased them and pretended we were shooting them out of the sky, except their instructor was worried by having idiots on his tail and made a determined right turn and buzzed off in the other direction.  After that we flew over the clouds and did a sharp spin around Blackpool Tower, and the instructor put some music on the radio which turned out to be the theme tune from M.A.S.H. which made us all gasp with the beauty and perfection of the sunlit moment as we glided over the rolling sea.

We were all still a bit stunned by the loveliness of the flight as we landed, including the instructor, who shook his head and wrung our hands and held them for a tiny second more than we all needed to.

Mark and Lucy’s flight came down a few minutes after ours, and the instructor told him that he could become a pilot jolly easily because of being a natural, and we buzzed off thinking that maybe we should think seriously about buying lottery tickets.
We took the children home and then went for dinner with our friends Kate and Kevin, which was superb, she is a brilliant cook, and he is ace at filling up wine glasses. We talked and talked and I honestly thought that it was about ten o’clock when somebody pointed out that actually it was well after midnight.

I am far too drunk to say much more, but I want to say that it has been ace in every way. It is our last day of holiday, tomorrow the children start getting on with prep and Mark and I go back to work. We have had the best possible time, and today has been the nicest possible finish in every way, first the flight and then the time with our friends, who are funny and clever and interesting and who looked after us so beautifully well.

They sent me a photograph to put on this of us being drunk and happy, but unfortunately it hasn’t downloaded yet due to computer incompetence issues.

I will give that a go tomorrow.

What a brilliant Christmas it has been.