I have had a lovely day.
I am quietly, contentedly, happy.
My world is a splendid place.
Number One Daughter is back at home, and apart from feeling rather more nauseous than she would like, she is alive, drugged into painless tranquillity, and planning to spend a few days at home in bed.
Number Two Daughter rang last night. Her best friend has sent a long and entirely offensive message to the ex Mrs. Number Two Daughter, explaining what we all think but are far too civilised to say. It is not at all a nice thing to invite somebody to come and live in your own country with you, and then dump them the day after they arrive. Especially when the country is Australia. We might have been more forgiving had it been Ireland.
Number Two Daughter sent me a copy of the message. It expressed all of our opinions in language which might best be described as ‘pithy’.
It was a satisfying read.
Lucy is going to be in a dance show at school.
It is a Disney Princess dance show, because of it being an all girls’ establishment. The girls each picked their favourite Disney princess, the one with whom they felt the closest affinity, and they are going to take on the soul of their chosen princess and express it through dance.
Lucy chose Maleficent. She is not technically a Disney princess, but Lucy argued that the difference between fairies and princesses was mere academic hair-splitting. You had to identify with your chosen character. It could, she said, only be Maleficent.
For those who have never had small children, and whose own childhoods have receded into the distant forgotten past, Maleficent is the bad fairy in Sleeping Beauty. She has purple makeup and long fingernails.
This can not possibly be missed.
We have booked the tickets.
Hurrah.
Oliver is at home for exeat.
He is in his bedroom, in the physical sense at any rate. In every other sense he is adventuring through the cyber-universe with a pack of his friends. We can hear them all over the house, shouting and laughing and cheering one another on, accompanied by the occasional rumble and crash and burst of gunfire. It sounds to be brilliantly good fun.
Apart from that we would hardly know that he was there. He has emerged occasionally, for sausages and bananas and pizza, but apart from that he has been entirely occupied, socialising in his dressing gown, alone in the middle of a happy crowd.
The modern world is a brilliant place.
I still spend most of my time in the actual world, despite the joyous marvels of technology. I ventured out into the front garden this morning. It was a beautiful morning, clear and sharp, the sort where your breath hangs in the air and you have to shield your eyes from the pale sunlight, low above the horizon.
Alarmingly, the winter so far has been so mild that the garden plants are already starting to shoot. I am a bit concerned about this. Whilst I am fond of daffodils I do not want them before Christmas.
Today I have slowed everything down a bit by dumping several sacks of compost on top of all of the beds.
This is our home-manufactured compost, produced out of melon rinds and carrot peelings and Mark’s wee.
You can do nothing better for your compost heap than to wee on it. I do not do this, on account of the neighbours and it being altogether too complicated an activity when you are wearing jeans and thermal underwear, but one of the happy things about being married is that Mark is around to oblige. He visits the compost heap when he comes home from a taxi shift, very late at night. This is in order to avoid surprising the neighbours, and because then he does not have to queue up behind me for use of the bathroom.
The end result has worked so well that we could have sent photographs to Smallholders’ Monthly, of the compost, not the wee, obviously. It has been quite astonishingly fantastic.
Today’s compost was perfect, brown and crumbly, with everything rotted down except the eggshells, which will come in handy for deterring slugs. I heaped it on the beds, around all the young plants and covered over the excitable shoots.
It looks as though I have wrapped the garden in a blanket.
It is all ready for the winter to come.
