New reality

I am having a slow but nevertheless effective meltdown.

Apart from the twin excitements of having Number Two Daughter in residence, the country in a state of collapse, and Mark’s taxi in smoking fragments in the alley at the back of the house, Lucy and Oliver have telephoned having changed their flying arrangements. They now need to be collected on Sunday afternoon instead.

I am sure that this, like everything else, is absolutely fine, and the only difficulty is that I am flapping about trying to rearrange all of my thoughts until they are in an appropriate pattern to match this new reality instead of the expected course of the next few days.

Maybe I ought to join the Conservative Party.

Lucy and Oliver are not sorry to be returning a day or two earlier. They have been travelling around Italy in a hired car, and Lucy is finding Italian driving habits quite astonishingly exhausting. I have never been to Italy, but I have done some driving abroad, and so sympathise. Compared to the English, lots of European drivers are enthusiastic nutters on the road.

I think our marginally lower death rate might simply be due to British driving lessons. I recall that these encourage the novice driver to look in the direction in which they are travelling, at least occasionally.

Lucy said that she was very much looking forward to the moment at which she could hand the hire car keys back to the chap behind the desk at Milan airport. I imagine it will be pleasant to get back to the Midlands where she will not be doing any driving more exciting than mere  high-speed police car chases in pursuit of some villain who has not paid his car tax.

In the meantime I have been flapping about. I have just had a flappy sort of day, and soothed myself by cleaning out the kitchen drawers. These have not been cleaned at all since they were installed some time during the bat-flu imprisonment, and if I am honest I am not exactly certain that I even cleaned them then. There was something dreadful living in the middle one, something black and mite-like that scurried away when introduced to the daylight.

It did not scurry very far. I am not in favour of needless slaughter, but that principle does not extend to squatters in my cutlery drawer, not even if they have got a majority vote in favour of claiming the territory as their own. There was a brief but decisive combat before they were extinguished and sovereignty restored.

It was nice to have clean drawers and a feeling of superiority.

I was almost completely alone for this activity because Mark had gone to work, and Number Two Daughter had buzzed off to climb up Coniston Old Man with her friends, taking Roger Poopy and Rosie with her. She did not take Roger Poopy’s elderly and irascible parent with her, not least because I can imagine no activity which he might have loathed more, except perhaps being asked to spend a day with friendly and adoring children. I took him into the Library Gardens in the rain later on, where he hurried inside the gate, emptied himself hastily, then turned around and set off back home.

I was glad about this. It was terribly wet.

Number Two Daughter said that they had managed to miss the worst of the rain, although she must have meant ‘except for the dogs’ because when they got back they were both soaked and mud-encrusted. This did not stop them from snoring contentedly on their cushion in front of the fire for the rest of the day, where they remained until Number Two Daughter took them with her to the farm this evening, where she helped Mark to load his engine crane into the back of my taxi.

That outing seemed to rinse off the worst of the first, so it was probably a Good Thing.

I will have my taxi back tomorrow and Mark is going to install the new turbo in his. This arrived today and is now waiting, unattractively, on the table in the middle of the conservatory. It was raining too hard this evening for him to start hauling the engine out, that will have to wait until tomorrow.

It will not be done in time for the weekend.

It might not be done in time for Monday.

It is a long and difficult job and will involve a cam belt, an oil change and a very lot of swearing.

On a happy note, the new plumbing has been extended to include the ice machine on the fridge. We have now got cold water and crushed ice just any time we happen to feel like it.

How very middle class we have become.