I am home.
It is very late and I am so tired I am not going to write very much. It is all I can do to stay awake to drive a taxi, this is being helped along with copious amounts of tea.
Obviously I am home in an on the taxi rank sort of way, not home in the sort of glass of wine and feet on the sofa sort of way. There is now some need to earn some cash, having spent it all on new central heating systems and on wine and poetry, and so here we are again.
It is the most peculiar feeling, being back here again as if the world has not changed at all, whilst really it has moved on its axis through about sixty or seventy degrees. A hundred and eighty would be an exaggeration. The Queen is no longer with us and I have got access to Cambridge University Library, any time I like, even if I don’t arrive until midnight. The world is not the place it was a very few days ago.
It is very quiet here.
I had a happy breakfast with Lucy this morning. Indeed, she came home at two in the morning, and I was sufficiently roused from my slumbers for a glass of wine and a chat, until we were both yawning too much to carry on, and so we reconvened this morning, with croissants and coffee.
The journey up the motorway was ghastly. I left Kettering at half past twelve and did not get home until seven at night. This was because a very lot of people wanted to drive past the roadworks, all at once. I did not exactly mind. I had got music playing, which was invigorating, and the dog for company, who was helping me finish the chocolate buttons, so it was all right.
Usually I listen to stories when I am driving, but I have had so many words to think about this week I felt I could not absorb a single one more. They would have started to drip out down my nose. I am fully saturated with words. There is a limit to anybody’s capacity for literary challenges, and mine had been filled until it had spilled over and was beginning to leak out on to my trousers.
I listened to Abba instead.
I was staggering by the time I got home, because of the camper van being so excitingly recalcitrant to drive. It is not what you might call a responsive creature. It has all the eagerness to please of a bad-tempered, elderly donkey, faced with sticky children on Blackpool beach.
To my surprise, Mark had made an enormous effort to clear up the worst of the new central heating clutter, and frankly the house was no worse than it was when I left it. Better really, because I have not hoovered for at least a fortnight. He had put flowers in every room and made a huge picnic salad, and there was a large jug of tea for work.
I was very touched and pleased. It is lovely to be home. The burnt sugar trees in the Library Gardens are at the height of their glorious scent, and the house smells of home, sort of clean with undertones of lavender and woodsmoke.
There won’t be any woodsmoke until the stove goes back in. He has repaired the boiler beautifully, it is black and clean and smart now, in another few days it will be back and the will be ready to heat the house for the winter.
The dogs were pleased to see us. They jumped and barked and sniffed and beamed their ugly toothy grins at us.
It is lovely to be home.
