I am having some difficulties writing tonight.
There are several reasons for this.
The first is obviously the very excitingly busy bank holiday, and I am writing in snatched two-minute intervals between very frequent customers.
The second is that my iPad, on which I usually compose these pages, is beginning to suffer from what I think may turn out to be a terminal illness. The keyboard is not working very well, and every now and again the whole screen goes black and everything switches off. It has been doing this for some time, but it is starting to reach the point where ‘not working’ is an appropriate description for what it is doing most of the time.
It is weary. It has been intensively used for several years and many thousands of words.
It wasn’t even new when I acquired it. In fact it first belonged to Lucy, who upgraded to a laptop, and even now pictures occasionally surface of her youthful self. She seems to be wearing some curtains in these, and misbehaving with other little girls in dormitories.
I have been looking at new iPads, hopefully, on eBay, but it is difficult to work out all of the important information before this one switches itself off. Also it is difficult to put the correct term into the search bar, because one of the letters on my keypad that is beginning to fail is ‘i’. I am guiltily aware that this is in direct consequence of my egotistical compositions, perhaps I should try harder to refer to myself indirectly, the way American soldiers have to when they start, and are only allowed to call themselves ‘this recruit’.
The third difficulty is that apart from customers every two minutes, nothing much exciting to tell you about has happened to me today.
There has been no word from Oliver.
This has not mattered, because we have been asleep for a good chunk of the day, having finished work after four and then been cheerily summoned into life at nine by the postman.
We tidied up and washed things and made our picnic and went back to bed.
When we got up for the second time we insisted that Lucy got up as well. She has finished all of her work and her GCSE worry and her new-clothes arrangements, and now she has collapsed into an end-of-summer hibernation.
We don’t mind this at all, she has jolly well earned it, but we needed somebody to empty the dogs, so we were obliged to request that she got dressed. She was disgruntled about this.
Of course due to the bank holiday we have not collapsed. In fact we have not been able to do anything nice or interesting at all. The world is full of people who would like to get in taxis, and we have not yet paid our mortgage.
This does not matter, because it is only for a very few days. By Tuesday they will all have gone happily home and we will be able to dash back to the camper van.
It is now almost three in the morning, and it has taken me all of the night so far to write this much.
I am going to go in a minute, because the nightclub is about to start chucking people out, and the head doorman has said that it is full of intoxicated idiots. I was not surprised to learn this.
It has been a busy evening, fuelled by chai and home made chocolate, and I will not be sorry to go back to bed yet again.
LATER
It is now almost five in the morning, and I was interrupted there by some intoxicated idiot-based revenue-generation. I am going to go to bed.
I had yet another difficulty when we got home, and I realised that I hadn’t taken a photograph, and didn’t know what to do. I was standing in the kitchen, hunting desperately through my past pictures to see if there was anything suitable, when Mark took a photograph of me, which he thought would do the job nicely.
