I have had a day of quite astonishing lack of achievement.
We have been to collect Lucy.
Of course the way we decided to do this was to work last night until just after midnight. Then we finished early, showered and changed, and hopped in the camper van, shovelling Oliver into the top bunk, to drive ourselves to York.
It turned out that the motorway was closed for the night.
In consequence of this we had a long detour. Mostly this was all right, because we had got a jolly good audio book on the stereo, but despite this, after a while things became a bit grim. I was glad that Mark was driving, because eventually not going to sleep became an impossible struggle. My eyes were closing, and the story began to fade into the distance, and I had to keep eating jelly babies to stay awake.
It was five o’ clock in the morning when we finally chugged to a halt in our preferred lay-by just beside Lucy’s school.
I was too tired even to clean my teeth after all the jelly babies. We set the alarm for ten and collapsed.
When morning arrived we sat blearily in bed for a while, drinking coffee and trying to arrive at something that might be described as awakeness. This was a groaning, gritty-eyed sort of process.
After a while a text arrived from Lucy, wondering where we were, so we hurled the coffee cups into the sink and rushed off, tugging our clothes over our heads as we drove.
It was ace to see Lucy. We tumbled out of the camper van and hugged her excitedly. The dogs danced about excitedly and barked their heads off, and all things considered we probably made quite a spectacle of ourselves.
Lucy did not mind. She had a large pile of luggage, stacked tidily at the entrance to Cloisters, which is the inappropriately named lower sixth boarding house. Between us we lugged it all across the lawns and over to the camper van, at which a handful of milling parents were trying hard not to stare, because of being middle-class.
We were a bit early for the pub then, but that was all right, because I needed to wash up, and Mark needed to do something to the brakes to make them work with a bit more enthusiasm. We stopped in the car park, and we had just got to the bit of brake-inspection where I had my foot on the pedal and Mark was sticking out from underneath the van shouting: “Up, down,” like a sergeant teaching press-ups to recruits, when Nan and Grandad turned up.
We retired to the pub then, for a large glass of Shiraz for breakfast, closely followed by an enormous lunch, with pudding.
This, as always, was a jolly affair, and left us wishing that we all lived closer to one another, it would be splendid to do it every week.
When we returned to the camper van Lucy said, with mild interest:
”Is the kettle supposed to be on?”
I had put it on to wash up, and then forgotten in the excitement of seeing Nan and Grandad.
We had been in the pub for two hours.
You will be very pleased to hear that the camper van had not erupted into a hideous flaming inferno, although the plastic knob on the top of the kettle lid had melted.
We counted ourselves jolly fortunate, and then went back to bed, all of us, including the children.
When we woke up it was teatime, and time to go home and get ready for work.
We were late for work.
So far today I have managed to slope off from work early, have wine for breakfast, set the camper van on fire and then turn up for work late.
It has not been one of my more successful days.
