We have made a monumental pig’s ear of the day.
If ever there was a rubbish way to go about living life, today we managed it.
We were woken up from an utterly oblivious sleep by the clock striking three this afternoon.
It must have been striking louder than usual, or perhaps the Gods were starting to lose patience with us, because we both sat upright in bed with a sudden sharp jolt of horror.
We did not quite know what to do then. We put our dressing gowns on and milled about in a sort of aimlessly panicky way. Mark went downstairs to make coffee and discover that not only had the lodger got up and gone to work, she had finished work, come home, had her dinner and was preparing to go out to work again.
She had got fed up with waiting for us to surface and put the washing on herself. She had folded the dry things up tidily, and I looked at it all with the stupefied lack of understanding that one has when one is desperately trying to catch up with a day that has not only overtaken you, but won the race and is having a shower in the changing rooms whilst you are still pounding down the first stretch.
We had got to take Lucy back to school. She was due to be there for eight in the evening, and we had vaguely conceived the plan of dropping her off, staying overnight in Yorkshire and then having a day out with Oliver before we dropped him off at school on Monday.
We had not actually mentioned this to either of the children.
It turned out that Lucy was perfectly aware that she was going back to school, and had packed everything in readiness for the event.
Oliver and Harry were still in their pyjamas, having survived on tuck and crisps for the day.
The dogs had become fed up of being ignored, and poor Roger had had an accident next to the back door.
We staggered about vaguely, trying to impose order on a day which was having none of it.
In the end I went to buy milk and Mark took the dogs out to the Library Gardens, where he became engrossed in a telephone call and the dogs buzzed off.
He spent the next hour searching fruitlessly around the village whilst I shouted things at the children and tried to pack up.
I remembered that I had got to send Oliver back to school with a costume for a character from a Gothic novel.
The lodger and I hastily assembled scarves and shirts and a flat cap which I thought Mark wouldn’t miss, and we told Oliver he could be Heathcliff. He didn’t know who Heathcliff was, but we thought it probably wouldn’t matter much.
The lodger rolled her eyes and went off to work, looking relieved.
The dogs came back.
I collected underwear and shoes and things I thought Lucy needed for school and threw them into bags.
Mark came back and bellowed at the dogs, who hid under the table.
He had had a rather startling conversation with his uncle about family affairs and wandered about the kitchen, picking things up and putting them down and looking confused.
I got him to clean Oliver’s shoes instead of getting under my feet.
We made Oliver and Harry get dressed and eventually assembled everybody by the back door ready to leave.
We had to go back for the dogs, who hadn’t come out from under the table.
After that I packed things away in the van whilst Mark went backwards and forward to the house for things I had forgotten.
We stopped in a layby just around the corner from school and had a late, late breakfast of cheese and crackers, before taking Lucy in.
It was quarter to ten at night.
She was very late.
Fortunately, since she is a sixth former, school did not seem to mind very much, although a security guard eyed us suspiciously as we trundled down the drive.
We retreated back to the lay by with Oliver to consider our lives.
We started to watch Wuthering Heights on Amazon so that when Oliver got to school he would know what he was talking about, but he said it was dull, and depressing, and too much like being at the farm anyway, and Mark agreed with him.
I agreed secretly as well, but it is a Classic Novel and you are supposed to appreciate it, not look in appalled horror at Emily Bronte’s evident mental health difficulties. When I write things it is to make people, including me, smile and feel better about their day. I do not know what Emily Bronte had in mind when she wrote Wuthering Heights, but I do not think that we were quite singing from the same hymn sheet with that one.
We gave up on mud and symbolic weather and moths beating themselves against windows and an inexplicably black Heathcliff, who I had always thought was a gypsy.
We had showers and got ready for bed.
Tomorrow we will do better.
Have a picture of autumn.
