Mark buzzed off to the farm leaving me supervising Oliver’s homework.
I couldn’t do it.
This would not have been so bad if it had been physics or something, not being able to do Lucy’s homework is a predictable event, but Oliver is eleven, and it was his English.
I couldn’t do it at all.
It was all about subordinate clauses in sentences. Here is one. Oliver, whose homework was impossibly difficult, sloped off upstairs to play at killing zombies instead.
It took me ages to work it out. Also I think that such awful sentence structures, which have got commas speckled all over them like freckles, are clumsy and should be avoided.
In the end of course we worked it all out and returned to his long division with some relief.
In between washing and Oliver’s homework I labelled his new cricket kit and went to the bank. We have had an unbelievably rubbish weekend. This is often the case in between bank holidays, because everybody saves up all their going out and does it all in one lump when they have an extra day off.
In consequence we are broke, but sanguine, because we will make up for it at weekend when the Bank Holiday hordes arrive, and in the meantime it means that we can keep our efforts down to a minimum, which always suits me.
Obviously we are working tonight. We worked over the weekend. The weather was bright but freezing cold, and I picked up one couple at about two in the morning who I thought might be hypothermic. They were shivering so badly that they could hardly walk, and the girl was almost in tears.
They had not dressed for below-zero temperatures in the first place. She was wearing his shoes, and a dress which could easily have been mistaken for underwear. He was barefoot, and wearing jeans and a very small T-shirt.
They explained that they had taken a short cut across the stretch of open land opposite the nightclub. This is occasionally used for the fair, or to graze sheep, and is a large field with little copses of trees.
They had, they said, got lost. She had lost her shoes, which was why she was wearing his, and they had been wandering around for ages. They were very relieved to find the road and a taxi because they were afraid of murderers, presumably grazing in the field along with the sheep.
They were so cold they could barely talk, and very upset with the world.
When I told Mark about it later he laughed a great deal, because he had been outside the nightclub when they came out.
The gentleman had said: “Fancy a wild one?” and they had disappeared across the road into the field.
Mark said that he had been mildly concerned at the time but had thought it discourteous to intervene, and had left them to it.
When we compared notes we realised that they had been in the wet field in the mud and the freezing cold for almost two hours.
I am very glad to be a person from whom the sense of adventure has been omitted.
I may be dull, but at least I am warm and dry.
The picture is the camper van, getting better and better all the time. It has taken over a year, and is still not finished, but one day it will be, and my happiness will be complete. We miss it very badly indeed, but it is beginning to look lovely.
It will look ace with the red wheels and the strips of fairy lights.
