Dug over

I regret to announce that Lucy did not pass her driving test this morning.

She failed for going too fast over a speed bump, and the examiner warned the instructor afterwards that he should take his car to be looked at by a garage because she hit it with an impressive clunk.

I am glad about this, it is better to fail for going too fast than for being a tiresome hesitant weed, she might have failed but at least she gets on with life properly.

Also she did not check her blind spot when reversing.

Modern driving is difficult, and I think the blind spot might have moved from the place it was when I took my test. Wherever it is, I never bother with it much either, this is usually all right unless you are in a place with lots of Japanese tourists.

I think that she will pass it next time, because she will know what she is doing and be a lot less nervous.

She was in a shocking state this morning.

Because of her lesson starting at seven, we were up at half past five, and even then it took her so long to force her cereal down that she could not finish it. She was grey with anxiety, and I felt desperately sorry for her. I am very glad that I am grown up and all this sort of challenging activity is behind me, how awful to be doing A Levels and driving tests and constantly being scored to see what sort of a grown up you might be allowed to be.

I had planned to go back to bed once she went, but of course I was so worried on her behalf that I couldn’t. Instead I walked and walked, along the beach and up to the shops. I thought  I might have a sleep then, but I had just got back to the camper van when she drove past it, in the middle of her test, and then I was too worried all over again.

I read my book until she got back, and then we set off for home, where we booked her another driving test for her first exeat in September, and then I was suddenly so dreadfully, mind-achingly tired that I went to bed.

It turned out that Mark had not gone out to install rural broadband, but to my enormous happiness, was busy preparing for the imminent arrival of a garden-filling conservatory.

It is brilliantly exciting to see your world being bashed into a new shape.

There is a great deal of preparation to be done, because he is going to have to knock down both his shed and the lean-to at the back of the house, and both of them are bursting with clutter that he thinks might be important.

When I woke up I came outside and helped, and we had a very happy afternoon doing Garden Things. Mark faffed about emptying his sheds and digging footings for the walls, and I dug all the plants out of the garden that I thought I might want to keep but that were misfortunately within the string lines of the new conservatory.

The remainder of the back garden was full already, and so I took everything up to the front, which as you recollect, is recently empty of trampoline. I dug it all over and filled it with soil from the back garden, and planted things. I was very pleased indeed with the soil from the back garden. When we bought the house it was not soil at all, but a sort of grey ash residue: and now it is brown and crumbly and wriggling with more worms than I have ever seen. This is because we are both interested in compost, which is another Old Person thing that you do not expect when you are sixteen.

Mark assembled all of his clutter on the lawn and we examined it. There are lots of heavy mechanical-looking things, most of which are rusty, and all of which he said would be expensive to replace if we threw them, away, if only we needed them in the first place, which as far as I can tell we probably don’t.

I don’t know what any of it is, because so far his explanations have failed to be interesting enough to hold my attention.

He took most of it up to his field at the farm, where it can all become overgrown with stinging nettles, and then when he came home we dug out the lawn and reassembled it in the front garden. This was a shockingly final thing to do, the back garden is very different indeed. There is no lawn, and there is a trench dug for footings, and the sheds are all emptying fast.

The new conservatory is really happening.

I am on my way to bed now. There was a lot of filling wheelbarrows and pushing them up the hill and around the front of the house. There was a great deal of bending and shovelling and lifting and tugging, and suddenly I have remembered that I am an old person.

Every bit of me hurts.

See you tomorrow.