I am very pleased to tell you that Number Two Daughter has saved our family honour in the Passing Things Department.
She has passed something called a Level Three Examination.
This means that she is a more qualified snowboarding instructor than lots and lots of other snowboarding instructors. More qualified, in fact, than almost all of them. The mighty Internet tells me that she can now teach snowboarding instructors how to be better snowboarding instructors, just like Number One Daughter teaches ridiculously fit people how to be even fitter.
She rang up to tell us about it this morning whilst we were still asleep. I heard the phone ringing downstairs, in the way that you do when a noise starts off as part of a dream and then turns into the realisation that actually you need a wee and also, eventually, that there is a tiresome ringing going on somewhere.
I finally found the telephone the third time it started ringing, and discovered that it was Number Two Daughter. She was very happy and completely intoxicated, since it was not first thing in the morning in Japan.
It wasn’t first thing in the morning in England either, because of us having worked late last night.
We expressed our delight as eloquently as we could given the hour, and then looked it all up on Facebook when we got up. There was a picture of her grinning so hard that it was making her ears stick out, and clutching an impressive red-and-cream certificate. We were very pleased, and thought how lovely it is to have a success happen in the family.
Once we were up we thought that we had better do things. Mark went off to collect more firewood from the Air Cadets and I went to the bank.
They had got loads of firewood left for him, and he was jolly pleased about it all. He filled the back of Lucy’s car with it, since it isn’t a taxi, and hauled it all back.
When he got back we realised that we were starving and some breakfast might be a good idea. We had got up so late that it was almost three o’ clock in the afternoon, sometimes this job leads you into some terribly disreputable behaviour.
It did not get less disreputable as the day wore on. I tidied up and Mark sawed firewood, and then I wrote some of my play whilst Mark built the fire up and pulled nails out of the bits of wood that he wanted to save.
I had thought that I would go to the gym.
I had really thought that I would go to the gym.
It was so much a part of my Plan that I had packed my gym bag and put it next to the back door.
I was just starting to think about getting my boots on when Mark came in.
He said that since it was nearly Valentines Day he thought that he might show me how much he loved me by cooking some cheese pasta for us, and we could have red wine and chocolate, and watch an episode of A Game Of Thrones.
I cannot conceive of any circumstances under which I could possibly have said no to a suggestion like this. It is all of my favourite things all rolled in to one.
We are nearly at the end of the very last series that you are allowed to watch. Of course there is another, last last series, that you can’t watch yet because it is not allowed out until April. As it is we are beside ourselves with the excitement of it. We watched some last week, and every now and again we sit in the taxi with a cup of chai and discuss what might be about to happen next, as if it were real, like international politics or somebody we know in the village. I like to do this, it is interesting without being troubling, like listening to The Archers instead of The Today Programme.
Anyway, obviously I said yes.
I will just have to go to the gym tomorrow instead.
The picture is the garden. I planted hundreds and hundreds of crocuses, because I wanted lovely drifts of colour in the springtime. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have worked like that. They seem to be coming out one at a time. There are one or two in every flower bed. One or two came out last week and then died.
You can see a couple of them in this photograph if you look carefully.
