I am feeling very excited.
We have planned a proper night off, not the sort like last night’s where I do my course and Mark goes to sit on the taxi rank for a couple of hours peace with his book.
I mean a real night off, the sort where you watch a film and drink wine.
This is pretty much my favourite sort, except for the ones where we go to the theatre and drink wine, or possibly where we go and see friends, and drink wine.
Anyway, dinner is already in the oven, or at any rate some of it is. I have got to think of something to eat with it, because nobody can just have a chunk of beef for dinner.
The point of the beef really is that it will do sandwiches for Mark for the rest of the week, because to my profound relief, he can go back to his rural broadband occupation tomorrow.
This will boost our finances considerably, which is always very useful when a month is drawing to a close. I do not know why everybody wants to take your cash on the first day of the month, but they do.
They still seem to want to take it even if they have gone broke last month, like our energy supplier did. I do not quite know what has gone wrong, but all the lights still work, so clearly the problem is theirs not ours. It appears that British Gas will be taking over the problem of pouring electricity into our plug sockets at an affordable rate. I am not exactly pleased with this, because as far as I can tell British Gas are successful because they economise on answering the telephone. That is to say, they don’t tend to bother, which is why we left them in the first place.
I can hardly believe that January is almost over already. We have got to go and collect Oliver the week after next. He is in the middle of his mock GCSE exams at the moment, which got off to an inauspicious start as it appeared that the maintenance team forgot to turn the heating on in the exam room. This led to a lot of grumbling not just from parents and students, but also from the poor staff who had to sit in there and shiver without even the distraction of trying to calculate the square root of the acute angle on the parallelogram.
Since I don’t suppose that this will turn into a problem in the actual exams, which are in June, I am not going to worry about it. Even in the north of Scotland it will probably have warmed up a bit by then, and he has got plenty of thermal underwear.
I was glad of mine this morning. I walked over the fell again, because I am still trying to think hard about book-writing. I thought of lots more things on the way, but nothing that has settled itself into a book yet.
I am going to have to think of something soon because my hips are starting to ache at night, probably they are just wearing out. I wonder if I would be able to claim for walking boots on my tax return if I become a successful writer.
When I came back I had the house to myself, because Mark had taken my taxi for its MOT. These come round irritatingly quickly when you have got a taxi, like the child on the roundabout who insists on waving to you and is traumatised if you fail to wave back.
You will be pleased to hear that it passed, by the way.
I took advantage of the peace and quiet, and lack of writerly inspiration, to try some of the chocolate ideas we had seen in Harrods, and produced a massive bar of chocolate truffle studded with salted fudge. We are going to eat some of it in front of the film later on.
I have just heard Mark coming in so I am going to run downstairs and we will consider dinner.
I am not going to write any more.
I am having a night off.
