We are in a car park behind the Palace Theatre in Manchester. It is very late at night.
One of the modifications to the camper van has been a white board on the wall, for leaving sensible reminder messages for ourselves, but obviously all that has happened is that we have all drawn ridiculous cartoon pictures in it. Whilst I am writing to you the rest of the family is still doing this, and laughing raucously.
We are also eating chocolates. There is no need for this whatsoever, as we have eaten lunch out, had crisps at the theatre, and then went to our favourite Chinese buffet at ten o’ clock after the theatre finished.
It was ace to see the manager again. He was so surprised to see us he almost fell over. It is lovely to go into the alien environment of a scary big city and find somebody who is delighted to see you and wants to hug you and tell you about their children and show you their art work. He is an unexpectedly brilliant artist.
This is difficult to write because of being distracted by everybody else shouting things and falling about laughing, and also writing texts to the lodger, who has had an unexpected haircut after a bleach disaster and is feeling gloomy.
We have eaten so much that the chocolates are entirely superfluous to requirements but we are eating them anyway, my parents gave them to us for Easter, and we would not want them to go off.
It has been a long, long day. It did not get off to the best of starts, when we had got to get up after about four hours sleep. I took the dogs up the fell for a run whilst Mark filled the camper van with water, and tiresome Roger Poopy buzzed off and could not be found.
I ran back up the fell again, and down again, and bellowed and electric-shocked his collar, which incidentally does not seem to work when there is a hill in the way. Eventually I had to give up and go home, soaked and very cross. Mark went out to look for him and eventually the vet rang to say that the gamekeeper had brought him in. This meant that we were late and that nobody loved Roger Poopy any more. Also we had to promise the gamekeeper that we would shoot him if he turned out to be an idiot with sheep, so he had better buck his ideas up.
We were not as late as we might have been, because I am used to getting ready for things with our family, and told everybody that we had got to set off at half past eleven at latest, on pain of death, parental violence, and also missing everything. This meant that when we finally did get set off at a quarter to one it was just about the time that I had hoped to leave, so it all worked out fine.
We had an ace lunch together. Once again, Jamie Oliver did not let us down, the chap can certainly cook. It was brilliant to see my parents, and we ate and drank and laughed. I would have liked to spend longer together, but we were starting to run out of day. In the end we had to say our farewells and wander into Waterstones, and in fact I would have sworn that we had only been there for ten minutes when we realised that it was almost time for the theatre.
Of course we all bought books, except Mark, who will read mine anyway. He almost bought a book about how to build a shed on your allotment, but decided against it on the grounds that we haven’t got an allotment any more, and in any case we wouldn’t have time to build a shed on it if we did. We have still got to build a shed on the field, which is going to be a different scale from an allotment.
The theatre was wonderful.
The Royal Exchange, for anybody who hasn’t been there, is a huge spidery metal contraption set in the middle of the old corn exchange hall. On the outside it is dignified and glorious and awe-inspiring. Once you go into the theatre bit it is quite astonishingly intimate, a theatre in the round with the audience sitting in tiers above it, a bit like Shakespeare.
We were groundlings tonight, which I liked, but probably not as much as being on the balconies.
We were watching Frankenstein.
It was scary and blood-curdling and sad and thrilling all at once.
It was the Mary Shelley sort of Frankenstein, not the Hammer Horror sort, but it was horrid enough in bits all the same, with fires and body parts and murders. We all loved it, and discussed the philosophical bits animatedly at the interval. Poor Creature, and poor Victor Frankenstein, awful story of people who had only tried to do their best. Also we all liked the more gruesome killings, and the bit when they found the blood-soaked animated corpse unexpectedly in the dark.
Oliver said that it was all quite complicated, and perhaps it had really been written by Shakespeare, which we assured him was not terribly likely. He liked it anyway, which was not surprising, given his preference for hideous undead creatures in his game-playing adventures.
We all loved it. Going to the theatre is one of my favourite things, and I don’t even mind that we are not staying at the Midland, which is my next favourite thing, because our camper van is so newly safe and warm and clean and happy.
It has been the best of days.
I am so happy.
