It was broad daylight by the time we all went to bed.
Lucy finished her evening’s work on duty on the dance floor at the nightclub, and I picked her up as my last run of the night. I was flagged on my way to get her by a crowd of desperate youths, but they had been so rude on our previous encounter a little earlier, that it was a positive pleasure to drive past them making an explanatory taxi driver hand signal.
When we got home it turned out that Oliver was still awake, and we had an impromptu gathering of our nocturnal family around the table.
This lasted until five in the morning. Lucy told us about blood-drenched dance floor fights, and we had our own stories of drunken debauchery to contribute. Oliver does a very good impersonation of a drunk person wondering what I do for a living.
Mark and I had takings to count, so we heaped them all up in the middle of the table, and the children helped. It turned out to have been a fairly lucrative night, and we showed the children the system of Queen’s-head-looking-at-you, little clip for hundreds, big clip for five hundred, change distributed in pots and bags. It had a faintly rascally feeling about it, sifting through piles of money in the half light of the morning, like being Fagin’s gang.
We thought it was the sort of thing it is better not to talk about at school, where they seem to feel that early nights are somehow synonymous with virtue.
In the end it was very definitely daytime, and we made our separate ways to bed, where we remained until the rest of the world was halfway through their Sunday lunch.
When we got up I had an argument with Mark.
This one has been brewing for a while.
I am very cross about the mess in his shed.
When I was single, and the proud occupant of my own shed, I kept everything in neatly labelled boxes, in a pigeon-hole system of shelving. I knew exactly where to lay my hands on the right size screw or straight connector or T-piece or set of tin snips.
As far as I recall, I think I am at least functionally competent at DIY, especially when equipped with a decent set of instructions.
Any such activity on my part has been rendered entirely impossible by the appalling mess in Mark’s shed.
Mark is possibly the untidiest person of my acquaintance, and he has never organised his shed even the tiniest bit.
I do not at all want to start a job by spending an hour hunting for the right tools, and then eventually trail out to the ironmonger to purchase rawlplugs that we already have in their hundreds if only I knew where they were.
That he knows where everything is is no good to me.
Today I issued an ultimatum.
It has got to be tidied up.
It has got to be tidied up and made useable by me, or anything that I don’t want will be cleared out, also by me, and taken to the tip.
This is harsh in the extreme.
Mark has got a lot of stuff in there that he wants to keep.
He was very upset.
After a little while he conceded that of course I was right, as I always am.
He did not tidy up. Instead he did one or two jobs in the house that he has been in trouble about for some time. This had the twofold effect of mollifying me a little bit and also getting rid of the bits for them, that he has been saving, messily, in his shed.
We are going to get everything out tomorrow and start on a Grand Organise.
I am very pleased indeed.
Have a picture of the tidy bit of the garden.
