Last night concluded with an unexpected difficulty.
Of course, as everybody knows, the clocks all changed last night. This is to give everybody an autumn bonus lie in on Sunday morning. By such means do governments of all creeds avoid revolution.
We had the lie in, so thoroughly that it lasted right through until Sunday afternoon, no matter which clock we used. This was because we had ended the night with a fairly trying difficulty, and didn’t get to bed until six o’ clock.
I am not sure which six o’ clock. I had lost track by then.
The problem was that all of the banks switched off their cash machines for the non-existent hour, presumably so that there could be no doubt at what time any disputed transaction had taken place.
This meant, unexpectedly, that at three in the morning every single cash machine stopped functioning until four, an arrangement thoughtfully designed to inconvenience nobody in the world except late night taxi drivers.
We were seriously and tiresomely inconvenienced, three o’ clock being exactly the magical hour at which our nightclub disgorges its collection of drunks, all of whom have spent every penny in their pockets.
As a result of this, we have spent a good deal of today chasing up debts. This is not because of anybody’s fundamental dishonesty, but because very drunk people, mostly, have got about the same capacity to recollect how they got home as Roger Poopy has to recall our telephone number.
As a sideline to this activity, once I had finished doing the usual morning washing up and laundry activities, I had promised Oliver that I would make pancakes.
I had smugly imagined that I would make a stack of pancakes and store them in the fridge to be consumed over the next day or two, and hence added ten eggs to a small mountain of flour.
They did not last as long as it took to cook them.
Mark and the lodger consumed theirs with shovelfuls of home made ice cream, Oliver and Lucy with sprinkled sugar. I am not especially keen on pancakes, especially with sugar, and did not bother, apart from a leftover bit of Oliver’s after he had eaten everything he could comfortably fit inside his waistband.
Even despite such virtuous abstinence, not a single pancake remained to be squirrelled away in the fridge for a desperate parenting-failure moment, which in the end I decided to consider as a compliment.
Encouraged by such an unexpected success, I had a bit of a clear out of things which were getting to the end of their useful life, considerably after it in some cases, and made curry.
I used up some horrible squishy bananas, the honey yoghurt, a stray chilli and the end of the cream that we bought to mitigate the health-giving properties of the camper van muesli. It made a very satisfactory curry indeed, especially with the addition of half a bag of prawns that had been forgotten in the bottom of the freezer.
We didn’t actually eat it because of having to go to work. I set some aside for the children to eat once the memory of the pancakes had faded, and then put the rest carefully in little tin trays as to be frozen as holiday food for the camper van. I was not sorry about this because it meant that I had an actual product to display to myself at the end of my day’s efforts, which is always satisfactory.
There is something disorientating about the change of the hour, and for the first time in as long as I can think about, we were ready for work early.
As the sun slipped below the rooftops a ruthless chill crept after it. I shivered when we took the dogs for their early-evening emptying, and when we got back home we pulled all of the curtains closed to shut the night outside.
We are on the taxi rank. The gritting lorries have been past, several times now. It is cold.
It is starting to change.
