It has been such a nice day, and as I write it is not yet over.
Mark has gone to Sainsbury’s to buy some pudding, and the children are downstairs wrangling about which film we are going to watch. I can hear them as I write. They are chirping and giggling, and every now and again there is a brief outbreak of violence. Lucy wins this because of being an off-duty police officer.
It sounds as though we might watch Dumbo.
We are going to have a Chinese take away.
I do not think we have done this for more than a year, not since the Government decided that people were not allowed to go and hang about in restaurants. We are having a day off, and Mark said that nobody should have to cook dinner. Not even pudding, which is why he has gone to buy some.
I can’t tell you how much this makes me feel contented.
Not only was it Mark’s day off, it was also Valentine’s Day, and he bought me a Swiss cheese plant for my office windowsill.
I have wanted one of these for ages. It is sitting next to me as I write.We have never celebrated Valentine’s Day because of it being an important day for earning a living in a taxi, and so I was most surprised and touched.
He wrote a poem as well, and even checked it on his spell check before putting pen to paper, because of being so dyslexic.
I laughed a very great deal when I found it on the kitchen worktop this morning. I left it there, and when the children got up, they thought that he must be in trouble for something, which of course he wasn’t.
I am very pleased with my world.
I was even more pleased because of it being the day off. This was absolutely brilliant, and after we had emptied the dogs, we started it with a huge family breakfast in the conservatory. We do these when we are all at home together, because it helps me mind less that we can’t go on holiday and eat exciting hotel breakfasts.
This turned out to be every bit as wonderfully exciting as any hotel anywhere. I had saved some Scottish smoked trout in the freezer from when we collected Oliver from school, and we piled the table high with our favourite things. There was a plate of piping hot sausages, and the lovely, lovely trout, and still-warm fresh bread with butter and honey. There was cheese, and cream cheese, and home-made yoghurt, and a bowl of black grapes. There was apple juice, and orange juice, and spicy tea, and best of all, there was the Christmas single-malt whisky.
We ate until we were sighing with contentedness, and then we sat quietly for a while, listening to the rain on the roof and thinking how splendid life is. Then the children sloped off, and Mark and I sat comfortably and imagined how we might design the conservatory space to make it perfect.
We are going to build another flower bed into it, so that we have got a permanent tomato bed, and we are going to make it look lovely.
We are not quite sure how we are going to achieve this. We wondered about making it look like a Wild West campsite, or perhaps a ruined Thai temple, or perhaps an English cottage garden. It actually is this, so we thought that would be boring. Then I decided that what I wanted was a look of opulence, so we went upstairs to look at opulent places on the computer.
Mark pointed out that the thing the opulent places had in common was that they were all a very great deal bigger than our house, and tended to feature marble pillars.
I thought we could make a marble pillar if we wanted one, we have still got some bits of worktop left. I was very struck with a picture of a bedroom in a Dubai hotel, done in magnificent shades of pink and purple edged with gold. I wondered briefly about staying there, once we are let out on parole, but when I looked it was ten thousand pounds a night, so probably we will just have to work out how to make one ourselves.
We have not yet come to a conclusion. We thought that a good place to start would be to take the stack of firewood out, because none of the opulent places on the computer featured stacks of sawn-up floorboards. They didn’t have tomato plants either, but we thought that was probably their loss, because fresh tomatoes are really good for breakfasts.
We whiled away almost the whole day in such contemplative mood, pausing to wallpaper a wall in Oliver’s room. He said that he wanted to feel as though he was somewhere nice, so we have stuck a wall-size picture of a Hawaiian beach on it. This is not exactly opulent, but gives the whole thing a slightly exotic feeling, at least if you ignore the forgotten socks strewn on the floor.
I can hear sounds of car crashes coming from downstairs, which does not bode well for whatever the children are choosing. I am going to go and investigate.
It has been the most gloriously idle day, and I have loved every minute. I am very sorry indeed that it is over.
Not to worry.
There is always next week.
