Nottingham

The thing about having an every-day sort of diary is that sometimes you have got to write in it when you would very much rather not.

Tonight is one of those times.

It is not that I do not want to talk to you. I like writing diaries and it is ace to think that people actually read them and are interested in the things that we have done, or more likely, are interested to hear the things that I have forgotten about or not got round to, or messed up. 

It is that I am full, and sleepy, and a tiny bit drunk, and it is very late. My eyes are closing and I am longing to go to sleep.

I am in an hotel in Nottingham.

I have not suddenly run away from home. I am here with Lucy. She has got an interview tomorrow with what was once Trent Poly. Now that everybody is clever enough to go to university we do not have polytechnics any more, so now it is Nottingham Trent University.

They are going to see if they will let her join their policing course. She has got to pass an interview with the University, and an assessment, and another interview with the police, and write an essay, and then join in with a group discussion. If she passes it all then she will be able to come here to do a degree in September if she wants to, and feels like giving them thirty thousand quid.

We do not know if she wants to. She is going to have a think about it whilst she is here.

Thirty thousand pounds is a very lot of money.

I drove over to collect her from school this afternoon, and we came down here together. It would not be at all nice to do something as scary as this all by yourself.

It is just me. Mark has rather nobly stayed at home to earn some cash and to get on with the Improvements.

We had a rather cheerful drive. It is nice to have a chance to talk to your children. They are a bit more grown-up every time I see them. One day I will come and collect them from school and they will be the headmaster.

We got hopelessly lost driving around Nottingham. It was dark when we got here, and snowing, and we drove round and around a very muddling one way system, helped along by an unsympathetic satellite navigation that did not seem to understand about bus lanes. Lucy navigated and I tried to avoid the trams.

In the end we found the car park, which was a multi-storey opposite our hotel. It was not a very nice experience. We had got bags and coats, but nobody rushed out of the hotel with a luggage trolley. I do not think that I like low-budget hotels very much. This one is a Hilton, which used to be splendid once, but now has cheap light bulbs and pretend leather chairs. 

This did not matter in the least, because we have spent hardly any time in the hotel at all. We dumped our bags in the room and dashed off to get lost in Nottingham again. We had dinner in a Chinese buffet restaurant, and then went to meet our friend Tommy.

Tommy is one of the nice people in life. He is the same age as Numbers One and Two Daughters, and lived with us once, long ago, when we were all much younger. Lucy was so much younger that she was still in nappies, and Tommy told her tonight how he helped her sisters to teach her to swear.

He is a photographer in Nottingham now. Regular readers might remember that once, long ago, he took some photographs of me and Mark without any clothes on for a project that he was doing at college. We thought that this was ace fun, but it made the children really cross. They said that it was not fair that they were the only children in the whole world who had to nag their parents about not putting naked photographs of themselves on the internet. 

The photographs were lovely. He is very clever. 

He is not a student any more. He is a real, grown up photographer. 

It was ace to see him. He told us about photographing weddings and drag queens and beautiful people and old people, and we listened with great interest. It is brilliant to be able to make people see things differently just because of the angle of a camera.

We had a lovely evening. We went to a pub that served cocktails, so we drank some, and they were so nice that we drank a couple more.

We got a bit giggly and giddy then.

We talked and laughed and swayed a bit, and eventually staggered back here, to bed.

It is very late.

I cant tell you any more about it because Lucy is just going to sleep, and I want to turn the light off and not disturb her. It is bad enough to have taken her out for a night of alcoholic debauchery on a school night, just before her interview with the police. I had better let her go to sleep now.

Have a picture of Mark’s Improvements.