This isn’t exactly abridged, because when you abridge something you start off with a long thing and end up with a much shorter one, like a haircut when you are feeling reckless, or the lawn when you have got the mower on the wrong setting. This is going to start and end short, there isn’t any cut off bit lying around somewhere to be swept up by a barber’s apprentice later. I just thought that to say it was abridged had something of a literary flair to it.
I am going to go to bed, and if I didn’t have to write this I would be in bed already. Mark and Oliver are emptying the dogs, Number Two Daughter is in bed, and Lucy is making herself a last bedtime nightcap cup of tea. We have just been for a holiday Indian meal, and we are all so full that we can hardly walk, like the moment in The Simpsons where Homer tries to become disabled by being dreadfully overweight, and has to wear a dress. Fortunately I have got a dress just like his, and as luck would have it I am wearing it at the moment.
We worked until four in the morning and then got up at seven. This was because we thought that Mark was going to have to go and install rural broadband. As it turned out, he didn’t, but it took ages to find that out, by which time we had already wedged our eyes open and were halfway down a Caffeine Surprise, the surprise being that you have forgotten to add the water.
Once I was awake I started packing Oliver’s things for Gordonstoun and realised that his school shoes had disappeared.
This did not matter because we knew that they had worn into terrible holes anyway, but it did mean that I could no longer ignore the children’s barefoot state.
In fact it was an emergency. We went to Clarks.
This was awful.
Being tired did not help.
Being tired in a shop full of squeaking children, charging about and bashing each other, and mothers desperately hunting down the last pairs of Velcro fastenings, was not easy.
When we got to the till and the person on the till was a LBQT, with a deep voice and a name badge that said Emily, I was too tired to work out whether it was least patronising to produce an artificially encouraging smile, or to be grumpy and abrupt about the lack of insoles. In the end I just stood blinking stupidly, and tried to pay with my car park ticket.
When we got home I made Oliver try on all of his trousers in order to upset myself with the three-inch gap between the hem and his ankles. There were two pairs of jeans that had once belonged to his cousin. I packed those.
Mark was fixing bits of the camper van, so I was in the garden on my own. I shovelled soil about and chiselled cement off bricks, and then suddenly it was six o’ clock, and we realised that were ravenously hungry and bone-crumblingly tired.
It was Mark who tactfully suggested that we went out for dinner.
I did not need any persuasion.
We ate and ate and ate until we could hardly waddle home.
This is how tired I was. I had to ask Mark to finish my wine for me.
I am going to go to bed.
