The sun is shining, and it is a holiday.
This is a wonderful state of affairs. It is not possible to feel miserable when these two things are both happening at the same time.
Of course it is not a holiday for us at all. Probably it is going to be a very busy weekend indeed, at least that is what we are hoping for. Despite this, there is the exhilaration of holidayness in our world. The children are home and we have only got to drive taxis and not get up early to install rural broadband, so it is very hard not to feel pleased with our lives today.
Indeed, we arrived on the taxi rank this evening to discover that the summer has truly arrived. A bit like the swifts, who are due any day now, one of the taxi drivers who over-winters in India has returned. He has spent the last four months staying in Kashmir with his family, and is brown and pleased with himself with a newly magnificent moustache. Of course he is brown anyway, but he is a lot browner now.
We dashed over to see him, and stood happily in the warm evening air, listening to his stories of fresh oranges and cows and mountains and sunshine, and felt faintly envious that he has had such gloriously exotic adventures whilst we have been trudging around Windermere in the rain. It is ace that he has come back, and heralds the arrival of better times.
Of course the day has been entirely occupied with child-collection activities, which meant that I could not either hang about in bed or go for a run this morning.
This was not too bad, because as you might recall, we had allowed ourselves a ridiculously early night last night, followed by a second sleep after the middle of the night cup of tea.
This last was lovely. After I had written to you we retreated back to bed by candle-light, and sat contentedly in our dressing gowns, drinking tea in the gentle glow, holding hands and talking, until our eyes began to close again, and we fell asleep.
I rushed over to York to pick Lucy up at eleven, and should have picked Oliver up at twelve, except that there were traffic lights, so it was half past.
Oliver was waiting patiently underneath the big arch underneath the bell tower, and grinned and waved wildly.
It was lovely to have them both back. They talked all the way home, partly about school and the things they have been doing, but also about politics and world news and philosophical things. This is the sort of thing that school teaches them to think about.
Oliver thought that HS2 would be outdated before it was even built and that the government should be investing the cash in more forward-thinking technology, and Lucy thought that too much entertainment is trying to push a political message as part of its cultural contribution to the world.
This made me think smugly that they had both become very clever.
Apart from my very pleasing feeling of parental self-satisfaction, I did not have much to add to either discussion, never having seen cartoons that feature transgender household pets, or thought much about Chinese magnetic trains. I asked them if they would mind if we called in at Asda on the way home so that I could collect yesterday’s forgotten shopping.
I had not thought carefully before I made this suggestion, and had neglected to realise that it would be expensive. We collected the forgotten shopping, and then bought Pringles in the green tube, because stupidly I had only bought pink, and Maltesers, because they had eaten them all in the car on the way back, and yoghurt without bits in it so that Oliver would eat it.
When we got home I was thirty quid poorer and rather less parentally smug. I unpacked the shopping and sloped off for another snooze. This might seem excessive but it is a long time between the alarm going off at half past six, and cashing up the takings at four in the morning.
I dropped the children off at the cinema on my way to work, with another twenty quid, so I hope we are right about the busy weekend.
The picture is Lucy’s school drive. It is not ace photography but it is all I have got. Even Don McCullin can’t drive and take photographs on his mobile phone at the same time.
