In yet another chapter of unexpected twists and turns in life, I am not at work, which is really where I should be. I am sitting in the car park, at Lucy’s school, in the dark.
I am in the camper van.
Mark is outside, in his boiler suit, taking Lucy’s car to pieces.
We are not far from the first year boarding house, and I can hear a chorus of little-girl giggles and squeaks close by. I think this might be rascally behaviour, because my recollection of Lucy’s earliest boarding school youth was that they were supposed to be in bed by now.
They are very definitely not in bed. It sounds as though they are doing the thing where you stamp around the boundaries of a place, yelling and bashing pans with sticks, to frighten away evil spirits.
If I were an evil spirit I would very definitely have buzzed off.
Lucy’s car is misfiring and we do not know if it is an injector or the plugs. Mark is changing the plugs at the moment, because they are cheap and quick to fix. We have got our fingers crossed that this is the problem.
It made for a very horrible moment during her driving test, when she accelerated on to a dual carriageway, and nothing much happened. She got a fault point for being too slow.
The thing about being eighteen and knowing nothing about the world is that she thought somehow this must be her fault, and did not mention it until the same thing happened on the way to school.
This meant that instead of fixing it in the alley at the back of the house, we have had to come and fix it in York.
We do not mind this, because we have got to pick her up in the morning in any case. Tomorrow she has got her police interview. We are going to take her to Northamptonshire all together in the camper van, so that we can wave through the windows of the police station at her, and cheer her on.
Obviously this has meant a day of faffing about. I had thought that we would get up early and rush off, but you won’t be surprised to discover that we didn’t. We did get up early, partly because I was so excited, but after that we filled the day with so many things that we did not leave until three o’ clock. We had to stop by Darlington at the Iveco breaker’s yard to pick up a new nut to fix the last disaster, and so now we are here in the dark.
It was not supposed to happen like this, but I have cultivated a patient and accepting nature as I have grown older, and am resigned to the slings and arrows of things not going according to plan. I keep expecting the school security to come and throw us out, but so far they haven’t. This may be because they have rushed after the camper van in order to throw us out several times before, but been obliged to desist because we have unexpectedly turned out to be parents and not gypsies. I expect probably they remember us.
It is our own faults really. I wanted to wash the sheets, so that we would come home to the sort of crisp white bed that people have in romantic novels, and it was such a wonderful sunny day that I pegged them in the yard to dry rather than draping them over the stove. Then I wanted fresh swirly bread to take with us, and spent ages chopping nuts and spreading chocolate and honey on the rolled-out dough.
Mark wanted to come back to a fireplace tidily stacked with wood, and took the dogs off to the farm to saw some timber.
By the time we had finished preparing a delightful homecoming for ourselves, it was the middle of the afternoon.
We had a cup of tea and some swirly bread in the garden, because the sun was beaming on us with pride at our efforts, and the hyacinths were soaking the pathway with their glorious scent. We spent a little while feeling contented with our world, and discussing design ideas for the tropical jungle banana plantation we are going to create when we pull the old shed down. Then we packed the camper van, and we were off.
I was as happy as a newly-bailed gypsy. The sun was bright, and the camper van was fresh and packed with new bread and freshly roasted spiced ham and lemon chicken, and we were free and on the road.
There is no lovelier feeling.
