I have been supposed to be writing my diary for the last hour.
Misfortunately for this activity, my father sent me an email this morning which contained a snippet dug up from some ancient newspaper, detailing an arrest made by my great grandfather, exactly a hundred years ago, when he was in the police force.
Two villainous children had been robbing sweet shops, and anything they had not stolen, they had subsequently broken, creating terrible mayhem and chaos in their rascally wake.
Once confronted by my great-grandfather they confessed immediately, and Retribution followed, of a rather more violent nature than we might be inclined to apply today.
Obviously I was utterly captivated, and secretly very pleased indeed to have produced an offspring who is set to follow in such a glorious family tradition, by which I mean policing, not vandalising sweet shops.
I telephoned the relevant offspring this evening.
She was gloomily engaged in an attempt to compose a presentation on the topic of Unemployment and Conflict Theory. We discussed this for a while, and investigated some online papers on the subject. I can tell you that these turned out to be so boring that the Shipping Forecast is a positive page turner in comparison, and I was not at all sorry to leave her to it and to come back to you.
I am glad that I have never come anywhere close to becoming an intellectual. It appears that you need considerably more concentration than I have managed to amass. If there hasn’t been a decently thrilling murder by Page Four I am probably skipping ahead to see if things improve, shortly after which it can go back in the Library Bag.
Lucy’s activities seemed to me to be a rather splendid illustration of our changing world, since I don’t imagine that her great-great grandfather ever occupied a single minute contemplating the sociological principles underlying the problem of crime in Salford, which was where he was the Thin Blue Line. Actually rather a stout blue line, as far as I have heard.
Lucy said that her police force would encourage such rascally children to write a letter to the shop owners saying that they were sorry, an outcome which we both felt would be rather less satisfying than the horrible physical revenge applied to their persons a hundred years ago.
If I were in charge of the criminal justice system I would have sent them to do compulsory community service in the vandalised shops until they jolly well understood what complete tiresome nuisances they had been.
I have not had a very busy day up until this point, in fact I confess that I went back to bed.
This was because I worked late last night and then got up two hours later to help Mark get ready for work.
Mark does not work late when he has got to get up early, it is just me, and this morning I was tired and grim.
I dispatched him with as much wifely fortitude as I could muster, and then took the dogs up the fell side. It was so excitingly wintery that Oliver declined to accompany us, and went back to bed until the rest of the world had got around to switching on their PlayStations.
The wind howled, and I marched as determinedly as I could manage in order not to get hypothermia and have to find a hole to die in halfway up. By the time I got back the melting hailstones were beginning to drip down my neck, and I was not at all sorry that it was over.
I could not go back to bed for ages, because I had put the bread making machine on, and I do not like the bread to sit in it for ages when it has done, because it gets dry. I cooked sausages and hung up washing and sewed name labels in Oliver’s new sheets.
We have replaced all of his bedding with bright red sheets and duvet covers, because of the impossibility of finding laundry in the mayhem that is the Duffus House laundry pile. Never again will we have to hunt through a tangle of thirty identical white fitted sheets until we come across the one which bears the legend Ibbetson on the corner.
They might run. I know that. That is not my problem.
After that I went to bed.
I was very glad indeed to do this.
I am going to go back there again now.
Have a picture of a once-vandalised sweet shop.
