I didn’t feel like coming to work today, so I didn’t.
This is one of the very best things about being me. How dreadful to have the sort of job where you are supposed to turn up whether you want to or not.
In fact I did come, in the end, just a couple of minutes ago, although already it is eight o’ clock at night, and the evening is not going to go on for very much longer, so I am not going to make my fortune tonight.
I came to work because I had run out of things to do, and we were starting to get under one another’s feet in the camper van.
The camper van is jolly nearly finished. It is all fixed and back together, and all that we need to do is stick lots of new carpet all over the walls and tidy up. There is a lot of tidying up still to be done. I gave up and came out because Mark was trying to build a new shelf in the cupboard that I was trying to paint, and really the two things were not going together very well. I thought that perhaps if I left him to get on with it and earned some money we would have ticked all of the achievement boxes for the day, and could feel pleased with ourselves.
Mark has been doing the camper van for the whole day, because there was no rural broadband to be installed. I have not exactly been helping, as much as clearing up alongside him and slowly putting everything back in the places where it is all supposed to go.
This was a bit sad as well as exciting. There was no point in putting back a pair of tiny sheepskin mittens that had once been Oliver’s, nor his little raincoat.
He used to call his mittens his glubs.
That was before he was almost sixteen with a deep voice, obviously.
I threw away the CD collection, because we don’t have a CD player any more, it is all on the mighty Internet. This is better, because it doesn’t jump or play the same bit over and over again because it is scratched. Also it is absolutely ages since we have listened to Organ Favourites from Dewsbury Cathedral, and I can’t actually remember what in earth we were thinking about when we bought it in the first place.
We came in for dinner when we realised that we were absolutely collapsing with hunger. We ate every single one of the cheese biscuits that the Peppers had made for Mark for his birthday, and there were a jolly lot of them, they had filled the cheese biscuit box and there were some left over in a bag.
Not any more.
I had not made him a birthday cake, because he does not eat much cake at the moment. Instead I had cooked a little joint of beef, with garlic and paprika and black treacle, which he has been eating on sandwiches, or just at hungry moments.
We sliced it up and put it on the cheese biscuits, which was ace.
Mark has been asking me what I want for my birthday, and I have promised to come up with some ideas. Really I think I would like either a pony or a puppy, but I had better not ask for those because we have got two dogs already and we would never fit a pony in the back yard. In any case you can’t have one pony on its own, it would be dreadfully lonely, so we ought to have two, and I don’t think Mark wants one at all.
All the same I would like one very much.
I do wish I could grow up. It is dreadfully inconvenient to still be six in my head. I ought to want nail varnish and jewellery like everybody else, but really I couldn’t think of anything less interesting. The problem is that my general tastes are still roughly fifty years younger than I am.
I don’t know what I want for my birthday. Probably some nice soap.
Have a picture of Mark in the enchanted fairy forest that we have grown in the conservatory.
I took it just before the plant ate him.
