We are driving back through Northampton as I write.
There was nobody about when we were milling around at ten this morning, but now, at almost midnight, everything is open and bright, and smells of every kind of international cooking are wafting through the streets.
We sat in the van outside Lucy’s house before we left. It was nice to be in the dark, just listening to people passing and talking quietly. We couldn’t understand a word that anybody said. I picked out Jamaican and Romanian and an Indian dialect, and the evening scent of spliff floated everywhere.
We have had a very busy day.
Mark has fixed Lucy’s car. It turned out to be the battery in the end.
Lucy came home in the very middle of the night, and wanted to stay with us in the camper van, so we were all close and quiet together. She did not even wake up when we drove round Northampton, looking for a car-battery-shop, and finally emerged, heavy-eyed and yawning, around mid day, when the heat became too much.
In the meantime we had gone into her house to see what was the matter with the broken fridge. We thought we might get another one, Northampton being full of the sort of little Indian-run establishment that sells second hand fridges and washing machines from big stacks in the back yard, but it has been jolly warm lately, and nobody had any left.
We thought we might try and fix hers until a substitute turned up, because it is not good weather to live without a fridge.
In fact Lucy’s mostly seemed to be suffering from never having been defrosted. A large brick of ice sat in the cold bit at the top, which turned out very much later to have entombed some minced pork and some beef.
We threw this away. It looked as though it might have been there for some time, like Otzi the Iceman.
We bashed the ice out and cleaned the fridge. Then between the three of us we set to and cleaned Lucy’s house.
She has been working a very lot of hours and writing essays for her degree in between. When she has finished arresting people and explaining in ten thousand words what the European Court Of Human Rights is going on about, she does not much feel like cleaning out the cupboard under the sink. What she wants to do is to have a glass of wine and watch a film on Netflix.
You can call her a hedonist if you like.
Today we set about remedying all of these omissions.
It took us all day, between the three of us.
In the end Lucy had to go off to work, and Mark and I carried on by ourselves. Then it was evening, then it was night, and time for us to go home.
In fact we were fairly impressed. For a young person she seems to be running her life rather well.
It was very plain that she is not much interested in the sweeping brush, but I am not either, really. I do tidying up because – well – because I like to live in a tidy house.
It is now very much later, and we are still not home. Exhaustion has overwhelmed us, and we have been driving between service stations, sleeping for the permitted two hours at each one. This is not terribly satisfactory but is keeping us awake, just about.
The sun is just starting to come up and the sky is beginning to turn pink and grey.
We are making our way slowly, slowly back. We are very glad we went. It has been a busy day.
