Camp

I am on the taxi rank in the rain.

Apparently there is a couple from a television series called Coronation Street having their dinner in one of the local restaurants.

I think this is very exciting, and have kept trying to look through the restaurant windows all evening to see if I could see them.

It would not do me any good if I did. I have not seen Coronation Street for about thirty years, and so do not know what any of its stars look like. It is not Deirdre Barlow or Hilda Ogden, so I definitely will not recognise them, I suppose I was really just hoping to catch a glimmer of stardust. Something suitably thrilling brightening the air around them. I am told that it is a person with ginger hair with a rather forgettable name that might have been Sheree. My customers said that she is with her on-screen boyfriend so perhaps they have fallen in love whilst at work, you read it here first.

Mark was rubbish when I told him about it. When I asked him if he knew any Coronation Street actors he thought vaguely that he remembered somebody called Bet Midler.

We have had a quiet day. We got up at lunchtime, and the sun was shining, so we decided that we would have a practice run putting Lucy’s tent up. As you know, Lucy is going to be a hired thug at festivals for the summer, starting in a couple of weeks with Glastonbury, and so a tent is an important asset.

She bought one on Amazon and it arrived this week. She has not slept in a tent since she was four, when she decided to live in one, in a field at the back of the house in France. I worried about this but she did not. One of us had sleepless nights worrying about burglars and wild boar and things going bump in the night, but it wasn’t her.

Mark slept in it with her on the very first night that she tried it, after which she chucked him out and said that she preferred to be by herself. She stayed there through thunderstorms and high winds and actual visits from deer and wild boar, and we had great difficulty persuading her to return to the house when school restarted in September.

She is not four any more, and so the tent is a new adventure.

We got it out and were just looking for the instructions when it started to rain, so we put it up in the living room instead.

We didn’t find the instructions, so I hope we did it right.

There is not much room in the living room when there is a tent in it.

We discussed sleeping arrangements, and I had the happy recollection that Number Two Daughter had left an inflatable air bed behind when she left, so we unearthed that from the colossal pile of junk in the loft, and tried to blow it up.

This took ages.

Mark said that it needed a bigger pump.

We all took turns. It still took half an hour, even if nobody’s legs had chance to get tired.

When we had finally blown it up there was absolutely no room in the tent for anything else.

I wondered if we ought to get a smaller one, but Lucy said that this would be rubbish if she wanted to have a friend to visit.

Mark coughed and Oliver said that her friends would just have to sleep on the floor.

The children went in to try it out, and lay in the tent singing songs for ages. Roger Poopy would have liked to go in as well, but he was not allowed, and sat at the entrance looking mournful.

In the end we had to take it all down again, because of not being able to get in and out through the back door, but we felt satisfied that Lucy will be able to live in at least part of the style to which she is accustomed, and she has reassured us that if it is ghastly she will leave and book herself into an hotel.

I have looked at the Glastonbury weather forecast. It is pretty good, so she will probably be all right.

It is going to be a huge adventure.