I do not think that this is an especially cheerful diary entry. I have tried to be bright and merry in the writing of it, but quite frankly I am exhausted, and sunk in weary gloom, and cannot think of a single brightly encouraging thing to tell you.
I suggest that you go away and read something more promising. It is not good for the soul to read depressing moaning. Newspapers are especially bad for this. They like to pretend that the world is full of things about which it is a person’s duty to become enraged. Half an hour after perusing the summary of the day’s events, almost everybody will have found something about which to be shocked and appalled, and broadly it is less trouble not to know.
I do not have anything shocking or appalling to tell you, but still I do not feel that my soul has a space for piping gaiety this evening, because of course the ghastly court case crushes on, squeezing the joy out of all concerned.
There can be no happy ending to a court case. Somebody’s life is going to be broken into irreparable fragments. It is not a beautiful thing.
I am sorry to say that I am not only exhausted, but intoxicated.
It is not a nice sort of intoxicated either. It is the flat, dark sort of intoxicated that comes after a long and tiresome day.
I suppose this could be because of the gin, of course.
At least I liked the process of becoming intoxicated very much. The Peppers had generously left some home made alcoholic cocktails as a welcome-home present to make us feel better, and I have now drunk a very great deal.
I think that they were a mixture of gin and rum and vodka. There was some fruit included as well. I know about this because there were lumpy bits floating in the top.
I am not sure whether or not this was a good idea, especially since I have got to get up to arrange breakfast for Oliver before school in the morning.
Indeed I am quite sure that it was not a good idea, but nothing short of committed drunkenness would possibly expunge the memory of the last few days, and so I am not regretful in the least. I do not want another night like last night, when I woke up at roughly half hour intervals, remembering some other thing I should have done or said, and woke up completely at about five, after which sleep eluded me entirely.
Once the day had started, the first thing to happen was a long and dreary wait for Mark and Number One Daughter, who had both got to be at the court by ten.
They had to give their evidence whilst I waited in the camper van. I could not have gone back into the court with them even had I wanted to, which I confess I didn’t. This was because of all of the tiresome rules about bat flu, which generally prohibit public entertainments.
Instead I took the dogs for a walk around Carlisle, and was saddened by its emptiness. Of course everything was closed, shop fronts shuttered and windows dark. It is Cumbria’s capital city, but it had the forlorn air of a once-fashionable seaside town after an especially bitter winter, and its poverty seemed to seep from every closed doorway.
Oh brave new world.
Mark was gone for ages, and when he came back he was white and exhausted. The barrister in court had suggested that he had not always done life as well as he should, and although everybody who has ever met him knows that this is not true, it had left a grim stain upon his happiness.
We waited ages for Number One Daughter after that. When she came it seemed that she had been the most polite of all of us in the court. This seemed to have been a good idea, and I was sorry that I had not thought of it, because when she came out, she was not nearly as upset about the court as she was about the inconvenience of not having been able to go to the gym properly.
It was lovely to see her anyway, even in such black circumstances.
It was mid afternoon before we finally set off home, and dark before we had unloaded and cleaned out the camper van.
I can’t tell you how reassuring it was to be back in our own space, in our house with the children.
I have had enough of courts.
Please come back tomorrow for something more cheerful.
1 Comment
You have to bear in mind that No. 1 daughter has spent years in the Military Police, and will be well used to writing, hearing, and giving evidence. In this area she probably has the edge over you. And how rude they were to Mark! Which of us has done life as well as we could? That would apply to every person in that court, but I would back Mark against the lot of them. No wonder you have indulged in a spot of Gin. or more likely a splosh of Gin. I feel like joining you.