He wouldn’t do that…

I am feeling a bit disorientated with my world.

Everything has changed. The children are home and Mark has gone back to work, and instead of fixing the camper van I am trying to sort out Oliver’s luggage.

Obviously I like it to have changed, it is absolutely lovely, but in true flappy style, it is making me confused.

I have still not caught up on missed sleep, and keep starting to do things, becoming distracted, and doing something else instead. This meant that today  had got six half-finished things strewn about all over the kitchen, one of which was mayonnaise, and had somehow made a lot of mess whilst I was not looking. Also, you might not believe this, but I forgot to do the washing.

I do the washing every single day of my life. I have no idea how I managed to forget about it, but I did. At three o’ clock this afternoon I was getting ready to go to work when I tripped over a huge pile of everybody’s shirts and socks on the floor of the conservatory, and realised what I had done. What I had not done.

I shoved it all into the washing machine without even bothering to sort it out, wondering if perhaps I am starting with dementia, and set it off, which as you might remember is a prolonged affair in our house involving boiling a kettle in the stove and tipping it into the drawer. Anyway it was already too late by then to peg it outside before work, and as I write it is still sitting in a crumpled pile in the washing machine.

We do not have enough clothes for that sort of carry-on.

Lucy’s friend is staying with us as well, which is just enough to make things just a bit unlike usual. She is a very nice friend, tall and gentle and quiet, like a long-legged foal, but I am not very good at talking about the things that young people think are important, indeed, I do not really know what they are. I am making friendly attempts at conversation whilst being aware that she is responding with a polite smile, and a very faint air of anxious puzzlement, so I do not think I am getting it right. I have discovered that this gets worse after a glass of wine.

I have, however, managed to start making piles of Oliver’s clothes, and an already-longer-than-I-would-like list of the things that need replacing because they do not fit him any more. I have dispatched our accounts to the accountant, and refilled the mayonnaise.

I have also, by way of a shirk, spent half an hour gassing on the telephone to Elspeth, during which we speculated about whether our beloved leader might really have personally planted cameras in Matt Hancock’s office in order to get rid of him, as is rumoured on social media, and I shared an interesting story I was told in the taxi last night.

I heard it in the taxi, so it must be true.

A chap assured me that his father had sat next to their local MP on the train a few days earlier. He was from a long way south, so it was not our own local twerp, I would not bother regaling you with stories of his activities. The MP told him that he had taken a call from the Lord Boris himself, and had been bowled over with joy that the magnificent chap had unbent sufficiently to telephone in person.

Boris, the MP said, had called to ask him to vote against the government when they all vote whether or not to let us out in a few weeks.

Vote against it, he was told.

I could not believe my ears.

I am telling you the story now just on the admittedly extremely remote off chance that it turns out to be true. If the naughty Houses of Parliament vote out Boris’ generous attempts to free us, you read it here first, and probably I will have been bumped off by MI5, or whoever does that sort of thing now that Prince Philip is no longer with us.

I have never hoped so much that a story turns out not to be true.

It is now very late at night, and I am sitting on the taxi rank wondering where the children are.

They all went out to the cinema, and to dinner in an  Indian restaurant, earlier on, and have since disappeared. I promised that I would bring them home in the taxi when they had felt sufficiently indulged in the excitement of Bowness nightlife.

The film started at five, and it is now eleven o’clock. There is really not that much do do in Bowness.

I am going to go and look for them.

Have a picture of the conservatory.