Probably I shouldn’t be driving a taxi.
I am tired.
That is to say, I am tired in the sense of a general pervading weariness suffusing my whole being. I am not, so far, sleepy.
I jolly well ought to be because we did not have very much sleep.
This does not matter in the least when you are nineteen. When you are heading towards sixty at a surprisingly hasty jog-trot it is an immediate downfall.
We had the most splendidly lucrative night at work, which was just as well because of the costs currently associated with everybody’s educational activities, but it did not finish until five in the morning. The alarm went off at half past nine, which was actually very shortly afterwards indeed, because Mark and Oliver were going climbing, with Elspeth’s husband and daughter.
I packed biscuits and sandwiches and slices of pie, and coffee for terrible emergencies. Mark drank it on his way there in the car.
I would have liked to go back to bed then. Indeed, it could be said that wishing to go back to bed provided something of a theme for the day, but I couldn’t, because the dogs needed emptying.
I poured some coffee into a cup and drank it whilst I staggered around the park. The dogs had had plenty of sleep, and bounced about all over the place, pooing liberally in every far flung corner that they could find.
I trotted after them for a while, and then gave up. The dogs did their own thing whilst I sat on a bench outside the church and listened to the singing. I do not go to church very often, because its main opening hours are in the middle of our nights, and so hence the cheery sounds put me in mind of Christmas.
The general feeling of mild numbness and intoxication helped to complete the picture.
Ritalin Boy was still not up when I got back home, so I occupied the intervening morning with scrubbing the floors. Rosie finds Ritalin Boy the most exciting person in the world, and I have spent the last couple of days swabbing up inadvertent leaks from the moments when her joy has become too overwhelming to be contained. I scrubbed them with scalding water suffused with a great deal of bleach, and felt reassured about the general sanitary respectability of our house again.
I did laundry and cooking and blinked sleepily at the world. Ritalin Boy got up and we went back to the park. The dogs managed to poo just as much the second time around, and Ritalin Boy talked, practically without drawing breath, for the whole time, he must have the lung capacity of a Blue Whale.
I tried very hard to concentrate and absorb what he was saying, which was a great deal harder than you might think, because it was a long and intensely detailed ramble about a game called Pokémon.
I am sorry to say that despite my genuinely determined efforts to understand and to enter into his eleven-year-old world, I do not now recall a single word, which has made me feel mildly uneasy about attending lectures at Cambridge in a few weeks. I might be dimmer than I had hoped. If I cannot even grasp the intricacies of a game which seems to involve cartoon rabbits fighting one another, I am not holding out great hopes for the collected works of James Joyce.
I fed him doughnuts and crumpets for breakfast, and we agreed on Super Noodles and frankfurter sausages for dinner, an arrangement which satisfied both of us.
I had hoped to slope off back to bed, but the phone rang with somebody wanting a taxi, and so I went to work.
I am still hoping to slope off back to bed now. In fact, the pubs have gone quiet and the only thing now stopping me is that I have not yet finished writing in these pages.
Well, at least that’s easily fixed.
