We are on our way to Blackpool as I write.
This was not quite the way we had expected the day to go, but in the end it has turned out for the best.
As it turned out it was a jolly good job that we did not arrange to go and visit Nan and Grandad.
This was because we had something of a misfortune last night.
Well, when I say ‘we’, actually I mean Lucy.
Lucy and her friend had a couple of dinner time glasses of wine with us before buzzing off to paint York red.
Of course one of the problems with going out in our brave new world is that everything you might do on a night out, like meeting new people and talking, or rushing on to the dance floor to strut one’s funky stuff, is now forbidden.
It is illegal to chat somebody up in a pub and to ask them to dance.
Dancing is, as you know, still illegal.
Anyway, Lucy and her friend had an evening out where nothing was permitted other than sitting by themselves at tables and drinking cocktails.
Under those circumstances they drank rather more than might have been strictly good for them, and did not have the chance to leap up and dance it off in between each one.
Lucy rolled in at around one in the morning and was not very well.
She was not very well in a fairly thorough sort of way.
I made her a bed up at the far end of the camper van, where she would not have to keep getting up to visit the bathroom, and went back to bed.
She might have been still a bit intoxicated this morning.
She had a shower, and we left her to sleep it off in our bed whilst we took the resulting laundry to a laundrette up the road.
Oliver, who is still too young for such shenanigans, had slept through it all, and laughed and laughed.
His day will doubtless come.
He volunteered to look after her, by which he meant that he would sit at the other end of the camper van in his dressing gown and play on his computer, whilst all the while listening for groans, and Mark and I went out.
Once we had emptied the dogs and done the laundry we strolled into York to have a look at the shop that sells computers, because my iPad, on which I am writing these very words to you now, is beginning to get tired.
I have written a very lot of words on it, and some of the keys do not work all that well any more.
This is not really a surprise. I write seven hundred words to you every evening, not counting all of the ones that get crossed out and I have to start again, plus emails and updates of my dystopian novel, and rude letters to our beloved leader and the august Daily Telegraph.
The Daily Telegraph has published a few, but our beloved leader has not replied even once.
Anyway, it is time for a new thing to write on, so we went to look at them, but did not buy one. This was because they were too expensive and I do not like shops any more because of the masks and the unpleasantness of not being allowed to touch things or wander about just as you please. I shall look on the mighty Internet instead, so that saved us a fortune.
When we got back Lucy was awake, and we had a family conference about what we might do next. We felt that we had had enough of York, and that a trip to Blackpool might be entirely preferable, so that was what we did.
We thought that we would still like to have some grandparents in the day. Hence, on the way across to Blackpool we called in at my own ancestral home to interrupt dinner and admire the gardens and drink cups of tea.
My father is purchasing a new garden tractor and has offered Mark his old one. They sloped off to the shed to look at it together, making interested manly noises and contemplating engines.
Mark is very pleased about this.
I like Mark to be happy, and so I am pleased as well. How lovely to have an old tractor. He would like us to go back and pick it up in the next few weeks.
I can hardly contain my delight.
Have a picture of our holiday so far.
