We are all wagged out.
We are still in Manchester. We are sitting in our camper van at the end of an action-packed day, and it is absolutely quiet. We have wagged ourselves to sleep.
Of course we started the day with the dreaded shopping. I went with Lucy and Mark went with Oliver, and we recommenced the dreadful tedious process of trying on clothes.
I do not know what Mark and Oliver did, except that it did not take them very long. Somehow they managed to be gone for almost no time at all, but bought everything that they needed. Lucy and I were still trying on dresses in the very first shop when they returned clutching a bag full of shirts and T-shirts and jumpers. They all fitted, they assured us, and they were exactly the right styles and colours, and they had completely finished shopping until he grows a bit more.
Lucy and I were down to a shortlist of about eight.
We tried them all on again in order to benefit from Mark and Oliver’s observations. They looked at them sagely, and discussed colour and fit and suitability.
Oliver did not see why it was important that a dress did not clash with your skin tone, and to be honest I am not sure that I did either, but Lucy said that it mattered, so we put the salmon-pink one back.
The grey one was too long in the back.
The mauve lace one did not feel quite right around the arms.
In the end we filtered it down to three.
Fortunately they were all very much cheaper than the ones we had seen the day before. All three together cost less than the one we liked yesterday.
They are very pretty. There is a long pink ball dress, and a pretty flowery white one for the end of year dinner, and a beautiful blue one for Speech Day. There was a pale blue one, the colour of summer skies, that I liked very much, but Lucy said that it made her look like a nineteen fifties housewife, and so it had to go back on the rail.
We were meeting my parents for lunch, and we faffed for so long that we were late, and had to run all the way up Market Street, puffing hard and clutching bags of shopping, to Debenhams Cafe where they were waiting for us.
If ever you are tempted to have lunch in Debenhams Cafe, my advice would be not to bother, they jolly well deserve to go broke.
They had an unfathomable system which was an uncomfortable cross between a restaurant and a buffet, where you pushed a tray round and people dolloped ladles of unappetising goo on to it. I accidentally shouted in horror when a lady almost dropped a splodge of dripping broccoli on to my plate without even bothering to wring it out first, and Lucy had to apologise on my behalf. The lady did not even seem to have noticed, perhaps people do that all the time when she serves their dinner.
It was nice to see my parents, and we had a second meeting a couple of hours later, for cocktails after shoe purchases.
We had to buy the sort of shoes that make me hot with rage, because I think it is utterly criminal to sell shoes which do not include ‘comfortable’ anywhere in the product description. I see women walking home barefoot every night of my working life, because their shoes are so painful that the risk of broken glass is better. It is a form of self-abuse, a carry on from the vile Chinese practice of foot-binding, and I think that high heels should be made illegal.
It appears that this view is less common amongst teenage girls, however, and in the end we agreed that we would have heels for the all-important walk across the platform, and find some pretty flat ones to put on the second she staggered off at the far end. We have not bought the flat ones yet, but we will.
We were supposed to be looking at hats after that, but we were utterly sick of shopping by then. Lucy said that she would buy one online, so we went to Waterstones instead, because we had some book tokens, and nobody minds that sort of shopping.
At the end of Waterstones we staggered back to the camper van, where we ate raspberry chocolate fudge, absent-mindedly, and considered our next move.
To our surprise it was six o’clock.
We thought that we would not go home.
We thought that we would go to the cinema.
I suggested a film about singing fishermen, which I had seen advertised, and which sounded quite nice, but I was unanimously overruled by the rest of the family, who wanted to see Captain Marvel.
Captain Marvel, to my astonishment, turned out to be a girl.
I do not watch this sort of film very much, and from my point of view the entire story seemed to consist of a long string of inexplicable explosions, but everybody else came out being very excited about it, because it explained lots of things that they had wondered about, related to other films, also about explosions.
I did not in the least mind that the film had been so startlingly puzzling, because it was so nice that everybody had enjoyed it so much. They talked, animatedly, all the way back to the camper van, and until everybody’s eyelids began to droop.
My eyelids are drooping as well now.
Have a picture of Manchester. Some black people were waving flags and dancing. I do not know what for, but I liked the music.
