My adventures are over and I am back on the taxi rank.
You might remember that last night we came back from Glasgow and it turned into an adventure because of the alternator breaking on the way. This led to a late night panic and me driving off to Kendal to get a new fan belt, and poor Mark wearing two sets of overalls and a vest and a woolly hat, and spending a frozen evening at the farm taking the spare alternator out of the sad donor taxi and putting it into mine.
All of this meant that it was very late at night before Mark finished having a dreadful car panic, and before I finished all of the evening jobs that normally we would get done together. In the end it was well after midnight before we got to bed.
This is the time that we usually go to bed and so you wouldn’t expect it to be a problem, except that this morning we had got to get up early.
We have been agonising about today for some days now. Lucy and Oliver both finished school for exeat this morning, and usually we would go and collect both of them and then go all together to have a small alcoholic party with Nan and Grandad.
This happy proceeding was made impossible by Lucy’s school deciding that they would hold a parents’ meeting and a concert and then give us a talk about being in the sixth form, none of which we anticipated would interest Oliver very much.
In the end after a great deal of deliberation we decided that Mark would collect Oliver and I would go down to listen to Lucy’s teachers telling me things.
We had to get up in the middle of the night. It is tiresome to have to be in York early in the morning if you live in Windermere.
When I arrived they were still serving coffee, which helped. It was all something of an Event: they very solemnly handed me an envelope at reception as I arrived and told me to take it with me for consideration. It turned out to contain the results of her mock examinations, which all seemed all right, and made me laugh, she got an A star for reading Mandarin and an E for listening to it.
She got an A in English as well, which also amused me, since she still hasn’t read the text, and confessed that when the teacher read the last chapter of Pride and Prejudice to them she was very confused to discover Mr. Darcy talking to the gardeners, in an egalitarian sort of conclusion.
We spent the next hour doing a circuit of her teachers listening to all of them telling us that she could do brilliantly well if only she read the question, after which we thought we might have had enough of school and sloped off without doing either the concert or the talk about the sixth form.
This was all right because Lucy says that she has had lots and lots of talks about sixth form and knows everything about it. I am not going to be in the sixth form and therefore thought that my need-to-know went as far as the amount likely to be on the invoice. They never tell you this in public anyway, in case you go white and have a sharp intake of breath and have to be resuscitated by Matron.
In any case Lucy’s friend Chloe has got a sister in the sixth form already and so they know everything that there is to know from the horse’s mouth. She has chosen her options and had a look round the row of cottages where the sixth form live, and so we thought that we were entirely adequately informed and could probably live without the motivational speaker and the violin concertos.
We slipped away quietly and went home, where Mark and Oliver had beaten us to it. We sat down around the table and laughed until we all felt warm and happy and overjoyed to be together. It is brilliant to have them home.
Mark and I went back to bed for an hour before work, and now here I am, sitting peacefully on the undisturbed taxi rank.
I have forgotten everything about my book whilst I have been busy, and have had to read it and try and remember what is supposed to happen next. It might take me a day or two to work it out.
That is fine.
It isn’t as if I’m likely to be doing anything else.
