The title is an attempt to pre-warn you that I am not at my articulate shining best.
I am going to go to bed.
I have had a terribly busy day and instead of going out to work I am going to write to you as fast as I decently can and then I am going to collapse into my very nice white bed. I am looking forward to this because it has got an extra pillow on it left over from my cough which I can’t bring myself to get rid of. Three pillows feels terribly decadent and I like them very much. I have got to be careful not to roll off their luxuriously excessive height and land on top of Mark.
Just filling you in on the complete picture. Authors do that, don’t they? If it was a real story that would turn into one of those key pieces of information that you skip over but turns out to be the vital clue as to why the spy was beaten to death with a rolled-up umbrella.
Anyway, that is my intention. Going to bed, not spies and umbrellas.
Also it wasn’t important, merely rambling.
I have been drinking, can you tell?
I got out of bed far too soon for decency this morning, because it was the day of saying farewell to Lucy.
This is terribly sad, for me anyway. Lucy seemed to be entirely sanguine at the prospect, apart from the approaching mock examinations.
She fretted about these on the way back to school. I was sympathetic, in the useless sort of way that you are when your own O. Levels are so many donkeys’ years behind you that you can’t even quite remember what they were, and in any case could make them up if you felt like it since nobody will ever, ever check any more. My O. Levels were so long ago that I could easily pretend that I passed fourteen of them with brilliant marks and nobody would be in the least interested.
Actually nobody ever has been interested. I don’t think anybody has ever asked to see the certificates, which is just as well because I haven’t seen them for at least thirty years either, goodness’ alone knows what happened to them.
I said kindly that she could always be a hairdresser or a taxi driver or go and work for the council if she failed them all, but she wasn’t encouraged.
When we arrived at school it turned out that nobody else in her dorm had done any revision either. They are all terribly worried about it, it must be awful to be at the age where you can’t drink too much and then have an early night instead of having sleepless anxiety.
I left her to adolescent girl squeaking and drove home. It was like leaving her in a hutch of over-excited guinea pigs, which also bustle about rather unpredictably and make a very similar sort of noise.
When I got home it was ten o’ clock and my eyes were desperately closing because of getting up early and having had an anxious sort of week.
I downed two glasses of wine far too quickly and then remembered that I hadn’t written to you.
This is the result.
