It turns out that the dozens of grubby children currently infesting our back alley and coming to visit us in our garden are not on their holidays at all. They have moved in, to a rented house on the street opposite.
As far as we can make out, there is a Catholic lady and her children, and her boyfriend and occasionally his children as well. They are from Preston, or somewhere, and there seems to be a visiting priest who turns up occasionally and imposes some order.
I am not sure what I think about this.
We had an upset with them the other night, when one of the little girls, who might have been about five, was alone in the alley, sobbing so hard she could hardly breathe.
After a little while I went out to see what was the matter.
As I was coming out I saw the boyfriend, walking away up the alley and laughing. He was taking no notice of the little girl, who was hiding in a gateway, crying.
I talked to her for a moment until she calmed down a little, although couldn’t work out what was the matter. Then the mother appeared at the back door, and I dispatched the child to tell her all about it.
Today Mark saw the mother whilst he was walking the dogs.
She was very grateful that he had mended all of their bikes.
Then she said that she was sorry about the little girl who had disturbed us with her crying. She said that the child was a bit different, and sometimes got upset like that, and that her policy was just to ignore it.
Mark listened politely for a minute, and then told her that people only cried because they were upset or distressed. He added that he thought that ignoring it was unpleasantly cruel, and left her gaping her excuses into the empty street.
He came home very cross.
I think we might be seeing quite a lot of these children. It looks very much as though they are not going to disappear back to Preston after all.
I am sure we will get used to it.
We have got a living room full of drum kit.
There are five drums and three cymbals and lots of chrome stands and levers and screws.
The whole lot was so filthy when we collected it that today Mark has started washing it and polishing it. Not only that, when we loaded it into the camper van, we stored it on Oliver’s bunk for the journey home. It was so grubby that we have had to take the sheets off to wash.
It was gritty with dust, and the biggest drum, which has a hole in the skin, was full of cobwebs and fluff, and had to be hoovered out .
It is cleaning up beautifully.
It is going to be jolly noisy. You only have to tap it lightly with your fingers, and it makes a loud cracking noise. Obviously I can’t resist tapping it every time I go past, I can exactly see what Oliver likes about it.
I am looking forward to hearing him playing it. I suppose this will wear off quite quickly, but at the moment it is quite exciting. He might even get really good at it, and one day people will say: ‘Oliver Ibbetson’ in the same sort of respectful way that now they say: ‘Roger Taylor’ who is the only famous drummer I know.
I did actually know a real drummer once, he was our neighbour years ago. He was not still a drummer, he was living out his old age recovering from an exciting youth packed with alcohol and drug abuse. He had been a drummer for a band called T-Rex. I liked him quite a lot but I would not be pleased for Oliver to grow up like that, so perhaps he had better carry on working hard for his Common Entrance anyway.
I have been busy whilst Mark was cleaning the drum kit.
It is Bank Holiday Weekend, and so we are going to spend every waking hour on the taxi rank. I am doing this at the moment, as I write, it is still early, and a bit quiet.
Today I cooked so that we would not need to worry about feeding ourselves over the weekend. If there is plenty to eat we can just get on with earning money without having to hunt fruitlessly through the fridge and then eating peanut butter sandwiches. It is not great to be hungry when all there is in the fridge is an onion and half a jar of mango chutney and an out of date yoghurt.
I made biscuits, because I felt guilty after we had been reduced to eating bought biscuits yesterday. Then I made chilli chocolates and cheese and bacon bread, and pecan nut and sultana bread, and a huge tray of sausages and some boiled Jersey Royal potatoes.
These are my very favourites. I do not normally eat potatoes with any enthusiasm, especially the large gritty sort, but for a few weeks every year whilst Jersey Royals are in season, we eat them every day, just with salt and pepper, which is enough.
We have got them in salads tonight. They are ace.
Have a picture of the camper van on our field yesterday.
