The bathroom needs cleaning.
It needs cleaning in a horrible, greasy, black-mouldy, soap-splashy sort of way that makes it not feel magical and restorative to use it.
I should have cleaned it today.
I should have hoovered and dusted the bedroom.
I wiped the dust off the top of the printer with my sleeve this afternoon when I sent some copies of my V5 to the insurance company. I should have dusted that as well, but I haven’t.
If I had been a properly responsible adult then I would have done it a couple of days ago, before it really needed it, but I didn’t.
Worse than that, this is another entry that will not grow to its maximum capacity for the same reason as yesterday’s, i.e., that I am drunk.
I am even more drunk today than I was yesterday, because tonight we did not bother to go to work. We had a bottle of wine with dinner, and then another, and by the time we got to the end of the third I was decidedly fuzzy around the edges.
Number Two Daughter, Mark, Lucy and Oliver all shared the wine, so perhaps I am not entirely culpable. Oliver is the least culpable, because he does not much like wine, but is trying to acquire the taste in order not to appear unsophisticated when he joins the Diplomatic Service in years to come. He had a decent attempt, but insisted that it was dreadful, even the bottle that cost £8.99. He might never make a true sophisticate at this rate.
I did not intend to get drunk, but it was inevitable, because we decided quite early on in the day that we would not bother going to work. We had a lot of things to do, and going to work as well just seemed like too much.
I don’t think I mentioned yesterday that my taxi failed its MOT. This was because the indicator that has been unsuitably placed on the wing mirror was broken . The reason for this is that we have to park as close as we possibly can to the wall, because the alley at the back of our house is very narrow. If you are generous by even a couple of inches then other cars cannot get past and you finish up having to get up to move your car in the middle of the night when everybody else is trying to go to work.
Somebody parked a couple of millimetres too close.
Not me.
Mark fixed it this morning whilst I made mayonnaise and cooked sausages, then I took it into Kendal for a repeat MOT whilst he started doing things to the back garden.
Once it had passed its MOT I took all the paperwork in to the council offices and hung about whilst they read it and copied it and thought about it. Then I went to Asda for everything I forgot yesterday, and then came home.
By then it was three o’clock in the afternoon, how my life does tick uneasily away whilst I am not looking. I try very hard to fill the unforgiving minute, although preferably not with distance run, not after all of the sciatica.
After that, to my joy, I was free to help Mark.
I knocked cement off bricks and he built another wall. Then I dug out the back of a flower bed and installed some plastic to stop the tree roots invading in to next door’s yard. I filled a plant pot and shifted soil about in buckets, and then we went inside to get dinner ready.
Somehow this degenerated into not much pasta and a great deal of wine.
We talked about the children being small. They were all small at different times, so they all talk over one another and have different stories to tell. I remembered all of it, and had a very happy evening being drawn from one sunny memory into another.
It was hardly any time at all before I realised that I was going to become hungover in the morning.
I wish I was more responsible when it comes to drinking.
I am going to bed.
