I am sorry to tell you that this is another not-terribly-exciting entry, because I have had a quiet day. It has been brief, as all Saturdays are, and the short period of wakefulness that we did achieve was filled with end-of-holiday activities like shoe cleaning and mending torn uniform.
Mark has been making half-hearted attempts at digging rubble out of the garden, but it has been a bit uphill, because he is not very well.
He sounds like an asthmatic steam engine.
He has a terrible cough.
This woke him up early this morning, and then stopped him from going to sleep when we went back to bed this afternoon.
He got impatient with it in the end, and got up again. He milled about the house for ages, answering the door to some idiot who had left her handbag in my taxi, and coughing all the while.
Eventually he nodded off on top of the quilt, about an hour before we were due to go to work.
I left him there for as long as I could, and tiptoed around trying to persuade the dogs to be quiet, but eventually of course I had to go and stir him into life, because of the school fees and the mortgage.
It is not at all nice.
Fortunately I am not of the sort of fragile disposition that is disturbed by somebody expiring noisily beside me, and none of this has kept me from my slumbers for even a minute. Indeed, yesterday morning Mark coughed himself into wakefulness, got up along with the excited dogs, emptied the dishwasher, raked the fire out and refilled it, and made coffee. I knew not a thing about any of it until the coffee turned up next to me.
Note here, for the interested. We are using a lot of ex-building firewood at the moment, and somebody correctly observed that it would leave the grate full of nails. This does not present a problem as we scrape the fire out every morning with an enormous magnet. We have several of these, because they are the means by which taxi roof signs are stuck to taxi roofs. They are large and powerful and are the very thing for removing hot nails from fireplaces. You need not worry about the welfare of our grate.
Oliver was awake as well. He is not as nocturnal as the rest of the household, and had made an appointment to meet somebody online at half past seven in the morning, probably a paedophile. He was most upset to discover, this evening, that he has got to go back to school tomorrow. He pointed out that I had said that it would be the day after the day after tomorrow, and the reminder that this conversation had happened several days ago did nothing to console him.
I was sorry about it as well. We do not seem to have had time to do anything much together, and the holiday has flown past. I like the children’s company very much, and their childhoods are slipping away into grown-up-ness like jelly dissolving in hot water.
Lucy has gone out to work tonight. It is her first night as a real, licensed bouncer. She is not just watching the others, and being discreetly looked after by the big scary rough boys. She is exuding her own air of menace, with boots and a black coat. She started at nine o’ clock and will not finish until three. I can see her from the taxi rank, small and determined in the row of door-obstructing giants.
I am impressed by how very fierce all of my daughters have become. I think when I was eighteen I probably still wanted to be a fairy princess, indeed, if I examine my motivations carefully I suspect that very probably I still do.
It is a good thing that I am married to Mark.
She is the small scale model bouncer with her hands in her pockets.
