I am back at work, and with so many things to do before weekend that I am feeling weary before I have done any of them.
On Saturday it is Oliver’s sports-and-speech day, followed by a communal picnic. This has all been handily snowballed into a single event for the benefit of boarding-school parents who have got to travel for hours and hours in order to get there.
This would be very handy indeed were it not for the difficulty of having to work on both Friday night, and also on Saturday. On both nights we have got to be at work by six, and probably stay there until four in the morning.
Oliver’s Speech Day starts at ten o’ clock in the morning after the first of these night shifts.
We have done these weekends before. They are unspeakably horrible.
Not the school part of it. That bit is the most glorious fun, and it would be fantastic if only we had the sort of jobs where we could turn up and laugh and drink too much and have a lovely time. I would wear a long floaty dress and not mind that glamorous heels sink into the cricket pitch.
As it is, because we are always so tired, we are usually wrapped in thick jerseys, and still shivering and gritty-eyed: and then we have got to rush off to work again. I wish people wouldn’t do all of their nice things at weekends.
I do my best to compensate for this tiresomeness by making sure that everything is done well in advance, packed and organised. We can sleep whenever an opportunity presents itself, and all we have got to do on the actual day is turn up.
We had to attend a morning Chapel service at Oliver’s school once. We drove across in the camper van after work, arriving at school at six in the morning, having taken driving turns of ten minutes each, because we couldn’t stay awake for any longer. We slept at the bottom of the drive, ready dressed in our smart clothes, and stumbled out just as the Tower bell was ringing, crumpled and incoherent, but undeniably present.
This event requires the preparation of a picnic, respectable clothes, and a bed in the camper van.
I could not buy anything for the picnic yet because we have not been at work for two nights, so the picnic will be tomorrow’s job, when I have made some money. This is entirely my own fault for being idle all week.
I made sure that our middle-class clothes were ready, and then dragged the sheets off the camper van bed to wash. This was because they bore horrible evidence of the presence of dogs in the household.
They dried on the line even despite the newly-arrived chill in the air, but when I went to put them back on I stood in a mysterious wet patch on the carpet, and recalled that we were having some sort of water issue.
I would have liked to blame the dogs, but when I peeled the carpet up to reveal the sodden puddle underneath, it was the wrong hue to be biological in origin, so we must have a leak somewhere.
I hauled the mattress off the bed so that I could see the water tanks underneath, but everything looked dry.
In the end I just left everything wide open to try and air it all out, and hoped that Mark would come back from work in time to have a look a it all.
Mark is not preparing for school picnics. Mark is installing rural broadband. The intrepid yachtsman has returned from the Med for a few days, and they are rushing about trying to make their fortune.
It would be lovely if they made one, because then we could finish work a bit early on Friday night.
Anyway, it all amounted to the fact that I have completely trashed the camper van. The carpets have been pulled up, the bed has been demolished, I can’t find the leak, and we are nowhere near to being ready.
LATER NOTE:
I had just written those very words when Mark pulled on to the taxi rank. He had finished work for the day and thought that he might just fix the leak before coming to drive a taxi.
He fixed the leak and remade the bed, so tomorrow I do not have to worry about these things. I have earned some money, so I can do some picnic shopping as well.
Things are looking hopeful.
