It is not easy to write a diary in the middle of the child-related fuss that is carrying on around me.
It has been a splendid day and has cost absolutely every available penny of holiday funds. We do not mind about this, because we have done everything that we want to do that costs money, apart from the other things that we are going to do tomorrow.
We will worry about them tomorrow.
Actually looking back on the day we seem to have done hardly anything at all.
I do wish that they would shut up. I can hardly hear my thoughts processing. There is a great deal of giggling going on, some wrestling, and not much washing up.
It is eleven o’ clock at night. It is dark.
We ate an enormous dinner and then watched a film which starred David Attenborough and some leopards. This was absolutely brilliant, there were speeded-up pictures of toadstools growing, and chimpanzees fighting, and some poor unfortunate ants which ate a spore. The spore nested in their brains, where it made them climb trees. They died and a tall fungus grew out of their heads and burst, scattering spores on all of the ants below. It was terribly upsetting, and I am glad that I am not an ant.
Watching things is one of the most splendid bits of being on holiday. It is truly wonderful to be able to see all of this amazing stuff, right in our own camper van. We all squished on to our bed with dishes of pudding, and gasped in happy astonishment at it all. Really, really, it was the most splendid thing. We rarely watch television things, and so when we do it is breath-catchingly marvellous. The high-speed fungus was quite astounding, fleshy and troubling and deathly.
This, however, was the last little bit of the day. Before that there had been a lot of wandering around York.
Apart from an entertaining half an hour watching a street juggler, who was called The Man With Big Balls, to Oliver’s side-splitting amusement, we spent much of our day looking at shops and buying things. York has got a Waitrose. I have never been in one before. It is not as middle-class as Booths, and has only got a handful of cheeses and olives and cooked meats, but what it has got looks very excitingly packaged, in shades of khaki, to make you think that it is good for you. We bought a caramel pudding for dinner on precisely that basis.
We bought exactly the same things that we always buy, only more of them, because the children are with us and wanted things as well. Fortunately they wanted exactly what we wanted. We bought scented candles, Oliver chose a grapefruit one, and Hotel Chocolats, Mark chose some Martini flavoured ones, and of course we went to Waterstones. This last was the bit that really cost.
Even that wasn’t as bad as it might have been, because the children both had their prize book tokens from school, which added up to thirty quid. The man at Waterstones kindly let us leave our shopping there once we had bought it, because we were going to the Jorvik museum.
I had been there before, but it was years ago, and since then it has been flooded and reopened, and I liked it anyway even before it was newly improved. It is not really a museum, but a mechanical ride around Viking York. There are some museum things in glass cases at the end, but apart from the skeletons those bits were not as interesting really, although Mark liked the Viking padlock, which was ingenious.
Our tickets last for a year, so we might go again, because there is a lot to look at. There are waxworks of people doing Viking things, and making Viking smells, and looking as though they are having a good time even though their entire lives are horribly primitive. Obviously they don’t know this.
There was a skeleton of a man that they had dug up. He had five abscesses in his mouth. I think I would have rather been dead. I have had toothache, and I live in a world with efficient pharmaceutical support. It was only one abscess that I had in my mouth, and I was very miserable indeed. This man lived at least until he was in his late forties.
All those years with five abscesses. The modern world is a wonderful place.
Whilst I have been writing the children have stopped rolling about the camper van trying to make one another squeak, and have showered and gone to bed.
I am going to go to bed as well.
I love being on holiday.
