I do wish that it was possible to have money without going out to earn it.
Our finances have been rescued from the brink of the abyss by the arrival of some rural broadband cash this weekend. This was so immensely handy that we both looked at the mobile banking page in silent awe for a moment or two, whilst relief washed over our worries like a wave over a sandcastle on Blackpool beach.
Of course, like the sandcastle, all of our worries were not instantly rinsed away. It would take a tsunami to do that.
All the same, it cheered the morning up. We made sausage sandwiches for breakfast and then Mark got his computer out and we did some financial calculations.
Obviously there is never enough money, no matter how many times you add it all up and deduct the council tax. We covered several sheets of paper with calculations and crossings-out in the hope that we might find an extra couple of thousand pounds hidden in the margin, but of course we didn’t.
As well as all of our usual expenditures, we are trying to create some extra money on the top. This is because we are rather hoping to book a trip to see Matilda at the Palace Theatre in Manchester at half term.
I would like to do this as a sort of final celebratory event whilst we still have a family. I go off into the prison service the week afterwards, and the children plunge into the terrible shark-infested waters of A Levels and Common Entrance, not to be seen with a smile until they have both fought and spluttered their way to the surface again, somewhere round about next June.
Of course we will still have Christmas and all of the normal holidays, but it feels like the end of an era, and I would like to do something exciting. After half term I will be gainfully employed, and life will change very much indeed.
Mark has told Ted that he can do as much rural broadband as they can manage once I have gone, but he would like to have the last few weeks building our conservatory and eating sausage sandwiches with his wife.
Of course it does not work like that, and since we have recklessly spent all of our cash, he is going to leave the shed roof flapping in the wind and buzz off to install rural broadband in the morning.
It has been lovely to have had the last few days at home together, but the taxi insurance is due this month, which we can’t afford no matter if Mark were to cover all of Cumbria with broadband this week, and theatre tickets are massively expensive. We concluded, sadly, that we have simply not got enough cash to be idle in the garden at home, and so Mark is going to have to go and get some more, after which we might or might not be able to afford the theatre.
I am not thinking about the insurance. Working for theatre tickets is thrilling and inspiring. Working to pay the insurance is dull and tasteless, like being given Ryvita with Dairylea cheese spread when you are hungry.
It is all terribly extravagant, because in fact we are going to go to the theatre next week as well.
We arranged this some time ago, and I am looking forward to it very much, it is a shining gleam in the dark fog of our domestic labours.
We are not going to take the children, because they are at school, and in any case it is a sort of spin-off from Shakespeare, for whom neither of them have any great affection. It is called Queen Margaret, like Lucy’s school, and it is about Margaret of Anjou.
We are going to go together, just the two of us. It will be like having a date.
I am longing for it with a gate-feverish longing.
It is on at the lovely Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. I wanted to go and watch it and then stay at the Midland, but we ran out of cash just thinking about it, and so we are going to stay in the camper van. This is fine, because the camper van is home, and Manchester sensibly does not care if you sleep in car parks as long as you have paid for the ticket.
We have got our two-pound coin collection to help things along. There is not much in this since Blackpool, but it is all handy. In a terrible emergency there is even our collection of fifty pence pieces with Peter Rabbit on them, although I was rather hoping that these might form the basis of our pension plan.
Hence we will be absolutely fine. Mark said encouragingly this morning that the brilliant thing about a theatre trip is that even if you go bankrupt nobody can come along and take it away from you.
We won’t go bankrupt.
Lots of Cumbria still needs broadband.
I will book it next week. Maybe.
I haven’t taken a photograph. I just added that one because I liked it. It was Gordonstoun.
