Some days happy things and terribly sad things just all mix together until you can’t tell the difference.
We have had the loveliest day, and now every now and again my eyes leak a little bit. I am not going to tell anybody about that, because of being British.
It is, of course, Number Two Daughter’s last day. She is leaving tomorrow to go and join Mrs. Number Two Daughter in Australia.
Of course, even though she is leaving so soon, we all worked last night, because of it being Saturday. It was four o’clock when we finished, and so nobody hurried to get up this morning.
We were expecting my parents to visit, but not until lunchtime, so there was no hurry. We sat in bed drinking coffee with Number Two Daughter and the dogs, and as lunchtime began to approach we thought that we might call my parents for an arrival time.
They said that they were just parking outside the Co-op.
We rushed into the garden in our dressing gowns to say hello, and then had to dress hastily whilst the kettle was boiling again.
They had brought us some flowers and a bottle of wine, and some honey from the bees in their woods. It has a lot of heather in it, and will be ace.
Once we were properly full of caffeine we went out for lunch. Obviously this was breakfast really, but it is not sophisticated to have red wine and cheesecake for breakfast, although I did have a fish cake, which was breakfasty, in a Scottish sort of way.
It was a nice lunch. It was ace to see my parents, and it is always lovely to do things all together. My family is the best company in the world, nobody else makes me laugh so much, and we laughed a lot.
We had booked lunch at a smart sort of hotel in Bowness, because we take the staff home and wanted to see what it was like. The staff tend to be a bit rascally, of the getting into nightclub fights type, but the hotel has been bought by Laura Ashley, and has a reputation for being splendid.
It was a bit moderately splendid, especially if you were to compare it to anything you might find in Blackpool. The food was jolly good, but to my surprise the hotel reception phoned me up just as we were starting to properly appreciate a bottle of Malbec, to enquire, rather grumpily, why we hadn’t turned up for the lunch that we had booked with them.
Mark and I wandered about and looked at the furniture, which is our current Special Interest, and tried it all out speculatively. They had got some dining chairs with arms, and one or two actual armchairs that we admired greatly. Once we were all stuffed full and a bit drunk, we retired to the lounge to wait for a taxi. Under the circumstances I could not decide whether to be amused or horrified to find that on all of the coffee tables there were Laura Ashley catalogues, detailing the prices of all of the furnishings should anybody be so thrilled that they wished to take some home.
We looked at the dining chairs with arms, but they were a thousand pounds each, so we didn’t buy one.
We had coffee at home in the kitchen, where it is always nicer than even in the best hotels, and where we were joined by Actual Head Boy and his father.
Then it seemed that it had been almost no time at all, but it was time for my parents to go, and for us to get ready for work, and this was awfully sad, because none of us will see Number Two Daughter again for years and years, and we might not be all together again for ages, or perhaps not ever at all.
It is always good to remember to enjoy life now.
