Planners

I am  very happy to announce today’s discovery that my portliness problem is not as severe as I believed that it was. 

Over the last few months I have found myself fitting rather more snugly than I would like into my oldest, least stretchy jeans.

This discovery has been partly responsible for the current instalment of my minimally successful, but eternally recurring, attempts to lose weight and become fitter.

I discovered today that the problem almost completely disappeared now that the weather has become warmer and I do not have both a thermal vest and a shirt tucked into the jeans. 

Indeed, with one loose shirt worn on the outside of my jeans, they fit much the same as they ever did. 

I was pleased about this, ne’er cast a clout until your trousers get too tight. 

Today was Oliver’s last day at home, and we spent it grouped en famille around the kitchen table doing his science homework. It turned out that we are collectively ignorant about the refraction of beams of light, but generally not too badly informed about the relative density and activities of the planets in our solar system.

When we had finished we had yet another discussion about the possibility of an annual holiday. 

There are several factors at play in this topic. The first, and possibly the most weighty, is that we have got no money whatsoever. With this in mind, obviously the various musings about trekking in India or strolling on Californian beaches were not the most practical of ideas, but we talked about them anyway, just in case we win the lottery. 

The thing to consider, we thought, was what we liked doing. 

Nobody likes lying on beaches, mostly because of the sand, but jellyfish and the awfulness of suncream play their part as well. The combination of sand and suncream is too unspeakably repellent for words, even without jellyfish. 

We thought that now the children are grown up and no longer gripped with passion for Jungle Jim’s and the Tower Circus, we might prefer culture to beaches, but an animated discussion revealed, fairly quickly, that we were all more than a bit vague about the actual nature of culture, and therefore would not quite know where to find it. We know where it is not, which is everywhere we usually go, like Blackpool, or Disneyland, but after that we were stumped.

Lucy proposed Greece, in a moment of inspiration, and suggested that we go and look at the Parthenon. We all nodded sagely, in culture-seeking agreement, but after a moment a quick poll around the table showed that nobody could come up with a single fact about the Parthenon at all, including the answer to the question: “what’s the Parthenon, then?” 

I thought that if we were going to splash out untold borrowed thousands on an exotic cultural holiday we needed to be a bit better informed than that. 

We considered.

We returned to the important problem of working out what it was that we all liked doing best.

The unanimous answer to that was ‘eating’.

Oliver added, thoughtfully: ‘and drinking nice wine’. 

We were in complete agreement about this, but quickly realised that it was not much help when it comes to choosing a holiday.

We thought that we liked going to the theatre, and to the cinema, and we all thought that we would probably like museums, especially ones with dinosaurs. We all like nice hotels, and whole-heartedly agreed that we would rather stay at home than patronise anything with less than four stars. We like the camper van as well, but it is a bit cramped now the the children have become full-sized human beings, and not really much good for anything longer than a few days if we are all in it. 

I am sad about this. We had some ace times in it when they were a more manageable size. 

In the end we concluded, rather regretfully, that we the sort of holiday that we would like would probably consist of two weeks of non-stop eating and drinking in a five star hotel, with occasional trips out to see something cultured, like the cinema or a castle with exciting waxworks, and some wallowing in a swimming pool in between.

You will be pleased to hear that we have already got at least one night of this booked, because we are going to go and see West Side Story in Manchester at Easter. We might have to stay in the camper van and one night is a bit short for an annual holiday, but it would be jolly good and we have got the tickets already.

Oliver and I discussed this on the way back to school.

If the sun shines, we thought, optimistically, and if Daddy finishes building the conservatory, then we could do most of the things we like at home. We don’t have any waiters but there are some excellent takeaways in the village, and Windermere Wine Stores is superlatively well stocked. If the sun shines we could swim in High Dam and watch films on Amazon and stay out overnight in the camper van whenever we aren’t working.

If we got bored with that we could take the camper van to Blackpool and cycle down the promenade. There isn’t any culture, but there is a good Waterstones.

I am feeling optimistic about the summer.

Have a picture of the place where the conservatory is going to be.