It is our last day and I am very sad about it.
It seems to have been such a short holiday, but tomorrow we have got to get up as early as we can, and leave. It is Friday and we need to be at work.
It has been a nice day for all that. It did not rain today, unlike yesterday, which saw little rivers running down the Strand, and enormous puddles filling any available spaces where paving stones had sunk a little. London is a dangerous place to be when it rains like that. I have never seen so many inexpertly wielded umbrellas. Fortunately we all still have our eyes, but this is just good fortune.
We did not really mind the wet. Mark and I were wearing flip flops, which meant that our feet dried easily, and for all the rain was bouncing off the pavements, it was not cold.
All the same, we were glad that today was better. We washed everything and pegged it on the line to dry. It was almost completely dry in less than an hour, which is a marvel completely unknown in the Lake District, so the water must just have sunk into the ground and disappeared.
Oliver and Number One Son-In-Law went for another little spin on the motorbike, and Oliver came home completely entranced by the joyful lawlessness of the whole thing. I hope he goes off the idea when he remembers how much colder it is in the Lake District.
The Event of the day was the arrival of Lucy’s A Level results, which did not go exactly as planned.
She got an A in Business Studies and a B in Psychology, but then to everybody’s horror, she has been awarded a D in Drama.
This does not make any difference to her future career because her place in the police is already assured, and she still scored enough points to be offered places at her chosen universities even if it wasn’t, and indeed the emails offering her places have been pouring in all day.
Nevertheless it was a ghastly shock.
She has never scored less than a B in anything. Her mocks were graded at A, and the feedback from the drama teacher during the A Levels was that she was doing well. Lucy had even thought that the papers had been good ones, and that she had acquitted herself well.
She was very upset.
We rang school to see what might have happened.
School told us that they did not believe it at all, and that they had already rung the exam board. They said that the problem had been her written paper, in which she had lost fifty marks out of a possible total of eighty
None of us believed that when we heard it. That is more wrong answers than she has had in her entire school career altogether.
School are so convinced that something is wrong that they have paid for a re-mark. They sent Lucy a form to sign and said that they would get it sent back today with a request that a different examiner looked at it.
They did not say ‘perhaps the examiner was drunk’, but we all thought it.
Hence I am a little more sanguine about her prospects. Had she just missed an A-grade, or even scored a C, we would probably have shrugged and thought nothing much of it, but none of us really think that this is right.
Today I am feeling very relieved indeed that she is doing the policing course. It is not nice to get a D in something, but it will not change her life in any way. I can leave school to get cross about it and do not really need to feel worried or angry on her behalf.
She cheered up once she discovered that school thought it was unlikely, and then retreated back to bed with some chocolate, where she fell asleep for almost the whole day.
She is allowed to do this because she has got a sore throat as well as A Level results.
We had a last dinner together this evening, and then sat in front of the satisfyingly huge television to watch a series called Chernobyl, which was about the nuclear disaster and reasons that you should not trust socialists. These must be true because they were on the television and we could all see them shooting the poor defenceless puppies.
We are going to bed.
The holiday is almost over.
The picture is one of our holiday snaps.
