It is the middle of the night and I am on the taxi rank, after a day of being entirely occupied.
We promised Oliver that we would have a day out with him today, partly to make up for our lousy parenting over the summer, and partly because we thought it might be just as easy as driving back here after we had dropped Lucy and then all the way back again tomorrow.
This latter turned out to be a complete error of judgement.
We woke up this morning in a layby near Lucy’s school having completely missed the alarm. I did not believe Mark when he promised me that it had gone off, and I had said: “Stop the noise before it wakes everybody up,” at which point he reached over and helpfully switched it off.
I had no recollection of this whatsoever.
In consequence, although not exactly late, we didn’t have time for very much hanging about, and had to drink our cup of coffee whilst driving, and some of the roads around York are bumpier than you might think.
Oliver wanted to go to Flamingo Land.
This turned out to be nowhere near either school, but almost in Scarborough, in a place called Kirby Misperton.
As it happened I was delighted to find myself here, because it made me think happily of Douglas Adams and his wonderful Meaning Of Liff book, which is the marvellous dictionary in which he adopts place names to describe familiar experiences.
I first read this whilst sitting in a pub by myself, and laughed so loudly and helplessly that everybody thought I was the nutter in the corner.
I shall quote it here, I hope he doesn’t mind. That is to say, I hope whoever is in charge of his estate doesn’t mind. Go and buy the book anyway, it is a joy to read.
One who kindly attempts to wipe an apparent kirby (q.v.) off another’s face with a napkin, and then discovers it to be a wart or other permanent fixture, is said to have committed a ‘kirby misperton’.
I am not sure that we had an exactly lovely time at Flamingo Land.
There are no flamingos anywhere. Instead there are a lot of thrilling steep-drop rides.
Mark and I have become too old to enjoy exciting rides, indeed, we might have become a bit too old to enjoy any sort of rides. Obviously we like Disneyland, but that is because of the massive joyous creativity of the place, not because we like being jiggled about and shaken and whirled around in circles. Actually neither of us likes that very much at all.
Mark is braver than me, and accompanied Oliver until he was too sick to do it any more, and we had to tell Oliver that he was on his own.
We all missed Lucy terribly.
Quite apart from her astonishing ability to enjoy negative G without a twinge of nausea, Flamingo Land included a whole street full of fountains and jets of squirting water which filled me with an unaccountable wistfulness.
From her earliest childhood Lucy was always the one who could be relied upon to leap happily into any available wet facility. We have known her to swim in the sea in December, not once, but at every conceivable opportunity. She would have loved the squirty things, and we would have all been soaked in moments.
We can be sure of this from our frequent experience with a similar attraction in Blackpool
Obviously none of us actually minded not being wet through, it is rather pleasant in late September not to be drenched to your underwear, but to my surprise the convenience of this was almost outweighed by the little sadness of Lucy being grown up and sensible, and also not there.
We all sighed a little for Lucy, and resolved to come back all together one day.
Nevertheless it was still a very pleasant day. There was almost nobody there at all, because of it being a Monday, and we didn’t have to queue for a single thing. It was warm, and September-misty, and the air was heavy with the damp, fallen-leaves smell. Squirrels charged about in the grass, foraging for nuts and fallen chips with equal interest, and part of the park turned out to be a rather nice zoo, which was splendid.
I am not usually very keen on zoos, some of the worse-run ones are so ghastly that they are painful to visit. Mark will not go to the one near us at all. This one, however, was well-spaced and pleasant, and every inhabitant seemed to be engaged in its own affairs, in a snuffly, busy sort of way.
We didn’t see anything that looked to be miserable, apart from a very grumpy rhinoceros. He was clearly very cross because of a beautifully enticing lady rhinoceros who was temptingly just out of reach on the other side of the fence. She must have been delightful, in a rhinoceros sort of way, because every time she did a wee he inhaled deeply and bellowed with frustrated passion, and bashed his horn against the fence, perhaps they were married.
In the end of course we had got to go, and we shovelled a reluctant Oliver back into the van. We were late, so we had to go belting through the beautiful Yorkshire countryside, and stop at the side of the road at the bottom of the school drive to insert Oliver hastily into the shower.
We made it back to school with minutes to spare, which we counted as a success, and made our way carefully back through the village in order to avoid all the less-successful parents hurtling into us around the blind corners.
We drove home slowly, bereft of children, and sighed at the thought of going back to work.
We are at work now.
It’s a good job we didn’t get up early.
I won’t be sorry when it is bedtime again.
