It has been a relaxed and peaceful sort of day, although getting up this morning was an achy sort of business.
In fact being in bed had been fairly achy as well. Every time I turned over, all of my muscles grumbled sulkily, in a resentful, half-asleep sort of way. Mostly my legs were all right, and the worst culprit turned out to be my back, which surprised me, because I was not aware that you use your back muscles much for walking. Obviously you do, and I hadn’t even been the one with the rucksack.
We sat in bed with coffee and compared soreness. Mark’s boots had made his feet hurt, and my back and one of my big toes ached. This is because I am old, with knobbly feet. If you are young and reading this, make the most of your sleek smooth feet whilst you can. Once you get to fifty they start to look like a bundle of pebbles wrapped in an old dishcloth, with horrible yellow slabs where once you had delicate pink toenails. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Apart from that, we were fine.
It is over. We do not have to worry about it any more. The Weekend Of Dread is passed, and the sun is shining.
It has been a lovely time, but all the same we were unspeakably relieved. It is hard work doing things without enough sleep, and if you do it often enough, like Margaret Thatcher did, then you go bonkers.
Fortunately it was only one night, and so when we got up we discovered that we were only aching, and not yet bonkers, which was good, and indeed, we felt remarkably cheerful. It had been such an exhausting weekend that the day had a holiday feeling to it, as if somehow we were excused from doing anything tiresome. Obviously this was not at all the case, not least because we had got to go to work, but it was nice not to have anything important to organise.
We watered the flower pots and ambled around straightening up the clutter left over from the weekend. I washed sheets and hiking socks, and Mark cleaned the taxis.
It is by far and away nicer to go to work when I have got a clean taxi. Nothing is nastier than getting in a taxi which smells faintly of last night’s horrible kebab takeaways, and has crumbs under my seat from the irresistible biscuit eaten to keep me awake outside the nightclub.
Also there is a bird with galloping diarrhoea living on the wall beside which the taxis are parked.
We had a slow, quiet sort of day, wandering about in the sunshine. We went to the bank, and posted some forgotten things to Lucy, and thought about our future. Not the sort of future where you wish you had invested in a Personal Pension Plan, but the sort where you have got to collect Oliver from school on Thursday and Lucy comes home on Friday, and you wonder if you might manage to squeeze in some kind of holiday before everybody disappears again a few days later. We probably can’t, but we wasted half an hour thinking about it anyway.
We thought that we would earn some money at work tonight and then go shopping tomorrow. This seemed like a brilliant plan at the time, but in the event we have been at work for hours and hours and have not yet made twenty quid between us.
We suspect that this is because the very last episode of A Game Of Thrones is on the television, and everybody wants to see if Jon Snow will change into a wolf or a dragon and who will live long enough to make the final credits.
I hope it is a thrilling ending, the sort that makes people want to rush out to the nightclub and drink and dance and get a taxi home.
In the meantime I am going to sit here quietly and read my book.
Have a relaxed peaceful picture.
