It is another good day. The sun is shining and the poor sodden Lake District is beginning to steam dry. Even the snow on the fells has finally melted, which is a cheering sign.
On top of all of this wonderfulness, we have Lucy at home.
She should not really be at home. She is supposed to be walled up in her boarding school writing essays and preparing for her A Levels.
The thing about being eighteen with a set of car keys is that the world becomes a rather excitingly accessible place. Suddenly she can do adulting, and instead of being a schoolgirl, today she has been to an induction day in Manchester for her new security job.
It has needed a great deal of very concentrated adulting. She had to drive there from York and find her way across the city into the Arndale Centre car park, where she had been organised enough to reserve herself a space. After that navigational challenge, she had to trek around the metropolis on foot, to find the headquarters of the security company.
We were very impressed with this, although she rang us afterwards in a bit of a flap when she couldn’t find her way out of the car park.
In the end of course she made it home in one piece, and we were very pleased to see her. She has signed a security guarding contract and was carrying a new bag emblazoned with their logo. Her new uniform will be arriving in the post this week. She is not just an adult, but has become a genuine hired thug for the summer.
It was after six by then, so none of us could spare very long to be together, because the children were rushing off to the cinema, and we were rushing off to work, although with rather less excitement. Lucy told us all about her adulting adventures in Manchester, and also about her slightly less adult adventures last weekend, when she sloped off after Saturday morning’s lessons and went to stay in York with some of her friends from school.
They went nightclubbing and behaved badly. I thought that this was probably a good idea, it is no bad thing to know what it feels like to be an idiot before you spend your whole life picking them up and chucking them out of places. She had a good time, at least the bits that she remembers, and the bits where she was not being exceedingly unwell, but thinks on the whole that she prefers the doorstep on the outside of nightclubs to the inside.
We were thoroughly agreed about this, obviously, since it is where we spend our own entire working lives. I have often thought how splendid it is to be sober and outdoors at night. I can sit in my taxi with a cup of tea, looking at the sky and listening to the sounds of the night, rather than breathing in the alcohol-sodden reek of the nightclub, not able to hear anything apart from the thump of the music. This is probably because I am old. It is nice to be old.
I made them both some salad for dinner. Oliver reluctantly agreed to this because his class at school has been learning about scurvy, and the textbook pictures are somewhat alarming.
Neither of them ate it, of course, but I felt very pleased with myself for having provided it, because obviously it was the correct motherly thing to have done. They were still hungry then, because of only eating the ham and potatoes, so they made up for it by purchasing crisps and buckets of popcorn in the cinema. Being a parent is a complicated business sometimes.
We will probably see a bit more of them tomorrow, we still have a little time before they disappear.
The picture was taken by Mark and shows the author in the sunshine. I was only visiting the sunshine in between cooking things, probably to bring the washing in, but you can at least see that it really happened.
I do hope it lasts.
