I am on the taxi rank, as I am sure you will have worked out.
I was here last night as well, but don’t tell anybody, because really I suspect I shouldn’t have been. I had to take a lot of drugs first.
Anyway, there is absolutely no healer like time, especially when helped along by codeine and antibiotics, and today I am doing really very well, as long as I take the drugs. Drugs are ace.
In fact it has been the loveliest of days. I am drifting along in the sort of heady euphoria experienced when you are convalescent, the gentle sort that makes you feel like Beth in Little Women, although she wasn’t really convalescent, as I remember it she died.
The children came down and got in bed with us this morning. They don’t do this very often these days, mostly because it is harder than it used to be, as they have both become rather bigger than they once were. Four adult-size people and two dogs makes a bed pretty full, I can tell you.
This morning was full of bright-eyed excitement, because we have suddenly all got so very much to look forward to. It is the end of an era. I am not ill any more, and we have almost got a new conservatory, and the children are about to start on their last term of school. Of course there are the A Levels and Common Entrance looming large, but after that the world is looking very promising indeed. Oliver is off to Gordonstoun, and Lucy to Northamptonshire, and we have got the summer to get them all ready.
We talked and talked. Oliver needs a new drum kit to take with him, and Lucy is going to need somewhere to live.
This last was more thrilling than anything. She wants to save up a deposit and buy a house, perhaps not straight away, but maybe after a year or two. It takes a little while before banks think that they might not mind lending you money, about thirty years in my case, but probably she will achieve respectability rather sooner.
We thought that working as a slab of hired muscle at festivals all summer would probably help get a start on the deposit, and we looked online at some houses not far from the police station and they were ace. Houses in Northamptonshire are not nearly as expensive as ones in the Lake District, we could sell ours and buy two.
We all daydreamed for a while about gardens and kitchen dining rooms, and thought that we could start putting beautiful things together for her Bottom Drawer.
Between the Bottom Drawer and the drum kit, we are going to have a very full house by the time they both buzz off, it is a good job we are building an extension.
When eventually we all tumbled out of bed, the children piled downstairs to get on with their holiday revision. The living room table is full of this, so it is a good job we live on picnics. It has been extended to its very longest, and is piled with books and papers and half-finished essays and chewed pencils, and of course, a slowly diminishing jar of sweets.
They spent the day working together, which seemed to involve a lot of noisy giggling and squeaking.
The sum was warm and gorgeous. I helped Mark in the garden, which is still thick with the blissful springtime scent of the hyacinths. He built some more of the conservatory walls and we have started taking the shed down.
I took the guttering down, and started taking the slates off the roof, but soon realised that this was not the wisest occupation for a person still staggering with occasional bouts of dizziness. Mark took over after a while, passing slates down to me so that I could stack them at the far end of the garden, where we will be tripping over them for weeks.
Once the shed is gone then we will be able to start thinking about the new roof and the new banana plantation. Life is just full of adventures to come.
I fastened my belt another notch tighter this morning. Silver linings everywhere.
