I think I am fast becoming the most boring person I know.
Mark says that suddenly he understands why the Acknowledgements pages at the ends of books are crammed with fulsome apologies and grateful thanks to families and friends, all of whom have been patient and put up with endless self-indulgent musing. Over the last week or so I have begun to completely ignore everybody who is not talking about my book-writing project.
I practically poked Mark’s breakfast into him with a stick this morning, I was in such a hurry for him to go and do oily things so that I could get on with my story. He had sat very patiently in bed with me for ages over coffee, discussing how big a horse would have to be to pull a cart over fells, and whether or not beef might be available in an eighteenth century pub in the winter, and where snowdrifts might be most likely to settle around an east-facing barn. This is all right because we have been married for ages now and in any case it upsets the dogs if we do anything romantic. Anyway, by the time we had got dressed I was absolutely dying to get on and write more.
Number One Daughter rang after that and offered to give us some money to see us through January. This was a jolly nice surprise, and I was very touched. Obviously I declined, as I thought this might be rubbish parenting even by my uninspiring standards, but I was impressed and grateful, and also asked her to keep the offer open just in case things got really bad. Mark’s taxi is due for an MOT next week, and Mark’s job for today was to visit scrapyards on the lookout for replacement bits, so we are hoping to keep costs to the minimum. We have put our entire week’s takings into the bank, and so we are hardly overdrawn at all at the moment, or at least, we are forty six pounds less overdrawn than we would have been if we hadn’t.
Lucy sent an email this morning as well. She is having mock GCSEs this week and has decided that she is going to abandon thoughts of an academic career in favour of becoming a stripper, which she believes will be less challenging. I am not convinced that she is right about that, but she is having ballet lessons at school so even if she does decide to set her sights differently at least she will have had a private school grounding for doing it.
Just to give us a complete hat trick of daughters, Number Two Daughter rang this evening, that is, rang in the sense that she sent me a text asking me to ring her, because obviously she is in Canada, and telephone calls are better if outsourced. She has passed her skiing teacher examinations and is having a Happy Ever After moment.
I was very pleased to hear about this, although I am not sure why she had to take skiing teacher examinations, since she is already a skiing teacher and has been one for years. If you are a geography teacher you do not have to report back to college every few years to check that you can still remember what the capital of Peru is, or even if you have found out any interesting new geographical facts in the meantime, like the capital of Swaziland.
Here is a short quiz that always catches me out that you could use to see if teachers are paying attention: apart from the newly-employed Donald Trump and our own PM, or your own if you live abroad, can you name five world leaders? I can’t usually, but that is all right, because I am only a taxi driver, and nobody ever expects me to have any facts with which to back up my opinions.
Once Mark had gone I made pot after pot of tea and stared at the computer, trying to make words come out in the right order to be interesting.
Of course I got distracted, which led to all sorts of intriguing discoveries, for instance that there was a rascally Scottish lord beheaded in 1745 who did exactly some things I had imagined my characters might do. I was very pleased indeed about this as it showed that I was not just having an over-excited imagination. I couldn’t include everything that he did in my story because of it being a children’s book, but I have saved the memory in case I ever need a super-villain in some future story.
I have written twelve chapters. That is absolutely loads.
I just need to keep putting one word in front of another.
