It is another good day not to be a tourist, mostly because it is raining.
I am not trying to be a tourist today. Ritalin Boy has gone home, and we have all collapsed into a state of exhaustion.
The exhaustion is not because of Ritalin Boy. It is because we have been rushing about and not getting enough sleep for ages now.
Mark went off to work this morning, and Number One Son-In-Law came out with me, and half of the Peppers, and Ritalin Boy , to empty the dogs.
This seemed somehow very difficult to organise. We managed to amble along together without too many problems, but the dogs belted off in four different directions, and Ritalin Boy in a fifth. In consequence there was a great deal of bellowing, and by the time we came home I was beginning to feel mildly lack-of-sleep frayed.
Ritalin Boy had to go home then, because Number One Daughter, who has had to rush straight back to work, is of course missing him dreadfully. I would have felt rather sad to say goodbye to him if it were not that they are coming back next week.
I expect I will have caught up on sleep by then.
I thought I would spend some of the day ironing, because it was the least difficult thing that I could think of, and also because I had still got a huge stack of school uniform waiting to be made respectably flat and then packed tidily in Oliver’s suitcase.
I was standing at the ironing board and realised that my eyes were starting to close. In fact, I was rather surprised to discover, I was beginning to fall asleep whilst standing up.
I washed my face in cold water, because we don’t have any other kind, which helped, and thought that I had better do something a bit more exciting.
I ate some chocolate. I do not know why everybody goes on about the dreadfulness of children being allowed to consume lots of sugar in things like ice lollies and tomato sauce. Current parenting wisdom is determined that this makes them wag about in a state of manic over-excitement. I wish that this were so, because if it were then there would be a reasonable likelihood that it would work on me, but clearly it is nonsense. I could have drunk the entire bottle of tomato sauce this afternoon without any beneficial effects.
This was what happened with the chocolate. I ate it and it was very nice, but it did not make me feel wide awake and excitable.
I had to get on with the world anyway, which had become dreary and grey due to an outburst of rain, squirted at us by the Weather Gods just as my washing was almost dry.
I brought it in, and then pegged it out again ten minutes later when the skies cleared, to blow the rain off it. After that I pegged the last lot out about an hour before I went to work, and all was fine until I reached the taxi rank, at which point the heavens opened and I had to telephone Oliver to rush downstairs and bring it all in.
Sometimes they are just not funny.
I sat on the taxi rank yawning and blinking, and trying to understand a podcast about interesting science things, without any success whatsoever, until Mark came past on his way home from work, and said that he thought we ought to go home.
He could not have been more right.
We went home.
I am writing to you in a hasty ten minutes between dinner and bed, and the ten minutes are up, and bed is calling.
I can hardly wait.
Have a boring picture of the Lake District.
