We are on holiday.
We are on lovely, glorious holiday in our camper van.
We have been on holiday all day, and now we are in York.
It is brilliant.
I have become very heartily fed up of my life over the last few weeks. There has been a lot of waiting on the taxi rank, if not exactly driving a taxi, accompanied by a lot of name-label sewing. The rest of my life has been entirely filled up by cooking and cleaning and emptying dogs.
When Snow White married the prince and was promised a Happy Ever After, taxi ranks and name tapes did not feature at all, or at any rate not in the version I read, and that was the horrid one, with the queen dancing in red hot shoes for ever.
Snow White went down in my estimation after that anyway. You cannot be a sweetly smirking princess with a heart of gold and baby rabbits for mates, and then dream up penalties like that one. Not even the stoniest-hearted of the die-hard right wing have ever tried to get eternally fried feet in to the statute books.
The point, in any case, is that happy ever afters do not tend to include cleaning up dog sick and boiling the bread maker.
This did not work, by the way. Do not waste your time on guaranteed home remedies put on the Internet by stupid Americans.
Just for your peace of mind, by the way, I do not intend to imply by that that all Americans are stupid. It is patently clear that they are not. They have invented all sorts of useful things, like the atomic bomb and the roller coaster. The particular Americans who suggested that non-stick could be repaired by boiling with vinegar and some powder incorrectly named as baking soda were either stupid or naughty fibbers. I am cross with them.
Also if it happens that the Americans did not invent atomic bombs and roller coasters you do not need to write and tell me. I made it up because it sounds likely enough, and because it appears to be quite all right to put any unsubstantiated rubbish on the Internet these days. If you have an urge to start fact-checking go and start somewhere else. There is plenty to go at.
The point is that I was weary and cross and miserable, and so we thought that we would have a holiday.
We thought that when we took Oliver across to visit his friend today we would take the camper van and have a night out.
We were so very pleased and relieved at that idea that everything collapsed all at once, and we accidentally drank far too much with the Peppers very late last night, and so we woke up this morning feeling very tired and with headaches.
After that we had to go belting around to try and get ourselves organised to get Oliver to his friend’s house at the right time. This was a hopeless muddle of washing and headache tablets and being late.
We dumped my newly-repaired taxi at the MOT garage on the way, so that it can also get a qualification based on what somebody thinks it ought to have got rather than on any actual achievements. Not that it is likely to go to Oxford. It doesn’t get as far as Ambleside very often.
We dumped Oliver with his friend, who is also tall and made of an unmanageable network of knees and elbows, and then we were on our own for the first time for ages.
This did not last for very long. About an hour, in fact.
We went to York, where Number One Daughter turned up with Ritalin Boy.
She has left him with us.
We are taking him to his Other Grandma’s house tomorrow.
It is nice having a boy again. Also he is the only other person besides me in the whole world who loves the battery-powered whistling ostrich that we keep in here. We played it dozens and dozens of times and watched it do its little dance, and Number One Daughter said that it was just awful and buzzed off.
It ha been an ace afternoon. We have walked on the city walls, which said that dogs were not allowed, but we took them anyway, and nobody minded. Also we had chips for dinner, which in my mind is always the height of slapdash holiday idle luxury.
He is asleep on the top bunk.
I am going to go to sleep as well.
It is wonderful to be on holiday.
This is a happy ever after.
