We have got a house full of children.
You would not think that two people who sleep for almost all of the time, and spend the few remaining hours of the day wired to the outside world via some youthful aspect of the mighty Internet, could make so much difference to a place. Believe me, they do.
Lucy arrived home some time in the middle of the night last night. I dropped round shortly afterwards to replenish my change box, and discovered the two of them in front of the fire, talking and laughing so intently that they barely noticed I was there.
They had both retired to bed by the time we finished work, but their presence was nevertheless unmistakeable. A clutter of boots and jackets filled the kitchen and remnants of pizza-for-dinner rested by the sink. The house has become warmer, and fuller, more intensively occupied than usual, and it is quietly splendid, in a dense sort of way.
Nobody got up this morning, except possibly Oliver, who was already in front of his computer when Mark made coffee at twelve. The rest of us slept on.
Nobody wanted to accompany me on my trek up the fell to empty the dogs, which was perhaps as well, because there was a blustery wind driving the icy raindrops, and they ran in little streams from my hair, trickling down my neck and dripping from my eyelashes.
I had gone out because I wanted to think, because of having another story to write, but it was a waste of effort because there is so much extra cooking to be done when the children are home that I did not get round to writing a word, and it is time to go to work now.
I am trying not to feel miserably cross and frustrated about this.
By the time I got back I was so wet that every single item of clothing had to be changed, and the sodden things dumped in a muddy pile in front of the washing machine. The dogs curled up together on their cushion in front of the fire, where they steamed, grumpily, for the rest of the day.
I could not loaf about growling and steaming, much as I might have wished to. Instead I made taxi picnics and children’s pizzas. Then I filled the oven with sausages and an enormous lump of gammon which will be sliced up and added to pizza and breakfasts and sandwiches and taxi picnics and practically everything else anybody eats for the next week.
Having the oven on turned out to be a good idea. I had got so cold and wet that my fingers had become clumsy, and it took the combined efforts of the oven and the stove and several cups of tea before they thawed. I was very glad I was not here on my holidays. It would not be very nice to have spent five hundred pounds a night to have become quite so mud-encrusted and chilled.
Aphrodite’s has got hot tubs in every bedroom. I do not approve of this at all, because it is such a shockingly wasteful thing to do, but I would not have been sorry to wallow in one today.
I did not get my story written. I had a small disaster when I dropped sausage-fat-soaked dog food all over the kitchen floor, and after the cleaning up was over there was simply no time.
The children have settled down in front of a film that they had both declared themselves desperate to watch, but which neither wanted to see without the other. Mark has been doing something in his shed which I think involves the dismembered tumble drier. I can hear him downstairs peeling off his boiler suit and hunting for his taxi jacket. The dogs are fast asleep and the dinner is done.
I am going to go off and see if we can make a fortune.
