Tomorrow

Short diary entry tonight, because we are unexpectedly busy at work, and I have tried to start this several times already.

It is very pleasing to keep having to stop writing in order to earn money. This will come in jolly handy next week, I can tell you.

Next week…we leave tomorrow.

Tomorrow. After all this waiting  at last it is here.

Mark went to collect Lucy this morning, because he is better at driving than housework.

It was a bit of a grim awakening. We collapsed into bed after work at half past four. When the alarm went off at eight neither of us especially wanted to get up, and we lay there for several minutes in disbelieving horror that the night had disappeared so quickly.

Obviously we had to drag ourselves into the land of the living, but there was an awful lot of groaning and grumbling and feeling very old. The dogs refused to believe it at all, and lay there pretending to be asleep instead of bounding on to the bed to see if we would like a wash before we get up, which is what they usually do. Mark insisted that they visited the garden whilst he made coffee, but they wouldn’t go for a wee, and just stood with their noses pressed against the door until he relented and let them in, at which point they just went back to bed.

We steamed our eyes open with tarry black coffee, and then Mark went, and I started on the process described yesterday by which I turn our house into somewhere it will be nice to come home to.

This involved dusting and a great deal of removal of hair from places. I am surprised we are not all bald, including the dogs. Especially the dogs, actually, they seem to have been leaking hair all over the carpets. They are not supposed to do this, they can both have haircuts when we get home.

I had just about got everywhere clean and the sheets all nicely drying on the line when Mark and Lucy turned up, with the usual colossal mountain of luggage. This meant another couple of hours of frantic activity whilst we hunted for clean underwear, and sorted washing from the holiday clothes, and dragged trunks and tuck boxes up to the loft, until everything was repacked in holiday bags, and we were finally done.

After that we had time for another hour in bed before work. This sounds like an ace idea, but actually the most memorable thing about it was having to get up again having only added another hour to our sleep total, and so we had the same gritty-eyed stagger around for a second time in the day.

This doesn’t really matter because tomorrow we will be on holiday.

A whole holiday. The last time we had this much time off work all at once was 2011. It seems like an unbelievable release, ten whole days all together, without needing to switch a taxi meter on once.

Hurrah.