It is midnight and I am only just starting to write this in a desperate exhausted attempt to get it written before I go to sleep.
I have been trying to write on the taxi rank, but one interruption followed another, mostly other taxi drivers who wanted to chat, because once again the sun was shining. When it rains you cannot get out of the taxi and stretch your legs, because you are wet for the rest of the night then, and the windows and your glasses steam up all the time. This is worse if your fan heater is not working properly, which mine never is. Mark started to fix it last year and got distracted. I expect he will get round to it again when I start getting cross around October.
It is not raining at the moment, and so we are all milling about talking to one another. I am not doing much milling about. I have been sitting with my door open and my feet propped against it in the open window space, and everybody has come to talk to me. I would like this better if I was not trying to catch up on unwritten emails and writing to you.
I have been flapping about.
Lucy is coming to see us.
She is setting off from Northampton after she finishes work at three in the morning, and will be arriving here just as we are putting the kettle on for our eye-steaming-open coffee.
Hence the wish to go to bed has taken on something of an urgent nature.
We needed to get her bedroom tidy, which we haven’t, although fortunately we have already removed the grandfather clock from its safe haven in her bed. We left it there so that it would not get bashed during our renovation activities, but we have more visitors than we thought, and so it had to come out again, because once there is a grandfather clock in a bed there is not much room left for even a small person.
I am looking forward to seeing her, even though some extra tidying up has been called for.
She will not have been gone again for very long when Oliver will be leaving as well. He is going to see a friend from school who lives near Number One Daughter. They are actual real middle class people, not just aspirational scruffs, and so some flapping about has been called for there as well.
Obviously he cannot go and visit people who have been introduced to the Queen whilst he is wearing outgrown trousers which were purchased in the Asda sale for one of his cousins about ten years ago. It is very important when you are middle class to have trousers which are roughly the same length as your legs.
He can take the old ones with him as well and leave them behind at Number One Daughter’s house for Ritalin Boy.
He is going to need garments which correspond to his size to go back to school anyway. I have been putting off the terrible moment, because of the inevitable massive cash outlay, but now I will have to arrange clothes which are suitable for visiting middle class people, ie, that have not been torn to shreds whilst installing rural broadband, and also that fit.
In the end, in a spirit of credit-card abuse, I ordered it all this morning.
Actually I did not order all of it. I have still got underpants, trainers, pyjamas and slippers to go. He might need a new dressing gown as well.
He has grown three inches during lockdown.
I was very, very horrified to discover that because of the tiresome, stupid bat flu, the school uniform shop has currently withdrawn its name-label-sewing service.
I do not know why bat flu might make you unable to sew, and I do not think it would cut much ice with Matron if I said that it had happened to me.
I am going to have to sew on all of his labels myself.
There are dozens, and dozens, and dozens of them. I am going to have sore fingers until October.
As it happens I have got some new clothes today myself.
We have been given a present.
Our next door neighbour has a girlfriend from somewhere in Africa, I forget where, and she has brought me and Mark shirts with wonderful African patterns.
I mean wonderful. They are brilliantly coloured and will no doubt leak dye all over the towels in the washing machine, but I do not care. They are lovely, and feel beautifully soft and silky. I am absolutely longing to wear them.
Also they do not need a name label.
I like that best of all.
