After all of the excitement of the last week, they are finally out.
The first twenty teams go on to compete in the last round tomorrow, but Number One Daughter and Crossfit Aylesbury were number twenty five.
Their competition is over.
Obviously I am sorry, because it has been such a huge adventure, which I have been able to enjoy in a second-hand peaceful way, from my armchair, without any bits of me aching inconveniently. All the same, there is a part of me that is almost relieved. The anxiety and excitement has been making me terribly jumpy, and I have got the opening notes of a throbbing headache.
If I am feeling like this then she must be positively twanging.
We watched them this afternoon, beavering away in the background behind an American team who were occupying the attention of the cameras, and thought how well they were doing.
It is very hard to represent your country in front of an extremely partisan crowd from another country, with a gaggle of television cameras all clustered around somebody else. You have got to be very focussed on what you are doing and not care.
I think they did this very well. I hope they go back next year, by which time the rules might have been relaxed and we can all go, so that we can cheer them along in person. The Americans do not seem terribly inclined to cheer for the British, no matter how sporting it would be if they did.
Maybe we had better not. Somebody needs to look after the dog.
Their dog, funnily enough, is the only one of all of the dogs who watches the cross fit on the television. Ours do not care in the least and settle grumpily under the chairs until somebody has got time to pay them some attention again. Tonka, however, sits up and gazes at the screen in rapt attention, as if he were keeping score, or if he had developed a sudden passion for muscle-bound Americans. Mark says that he is just familiar with people lifting weights and knows that it is important.
Perhaps our dogs would be interested in watching a laundry programme.
We have not had much time for watching anything today, and indeed, we had to dash round to finish in time so that we could watch Number One Daughter from the taxi rank.
It was a short day, as Saturdays always are, because of getting up late and going to work early. Indeed, most of the morning was occupied with drinking coffee in bed and contemplating our existence.
This was not quite as idle as it sounds, because it was not philosophical contemplation, the sort of idle wondering as to whether one is the same person one was ten years ago, or whether perhaps God is a political construct.
In fact we were doing the sort of sums that you need to do when you know you are going to go to London in January, and you want to know how much it is going to cost.
The answer is, probably less than the cost of getting there on the shockingly expensive train.
We are going to save up and up and up until we can pay all of our bills for that week in advance, and so that we can joyfully flounce about the streets of London without a care in the world.
We have booked tickets to see the Harry Potter play, which is especially exciting, because it fills up not one, but two whole performances. You go to the matinee, have a break for a spot of tiffin, and then the evening performance, by the end of which I imagine you are both enchanted and blown away.
Apparently there are lots of exciting special effects. I am looking forward to these. I have got no more taste in theatre than in anything else, and like it to be good and spectacular, preferably with flying and explosions.
Harry Potter is looking jolly promising on all of these counts.
We are wondering whether or not we can manage anything else during our long foray south. Obviously we will go and visit Number One Daughter, which will be lovely, but we might also try and manage a second theatre visit if we have managed to save up enough.
I like the look of Cabaret, which has got Eddie Redmayne playing Emcee, and which could be quite brilliant. It is jolly expensive, but less expensive than going on the train, so maybe we might consider it.
We will have to see. The world is becoming a complete dish of seafood at the moment.
There isn’t anything long about the weights. I just wanted to use the word in a pun and couldn’t think of anything better.
