I have not become more cheerful.
For those of you wishing for a merry little read, I suggest that instead you go away and read the BBC’s agenda for their Campaign Against Bias And In Favour Of Diversity, in which they explain that they want everybody represented on the screens of the BBC except female newsreaders over forty.
I do not know if they actually have such a report, in case anybody was tempted, but I am quite sure that they have got reams and reams of equally dull twaddle if you are determined to find something soporific.
In any case I am not feeling merry. Tragedy has overtaken tragedy. I have wasted my entire assignment-writing day in preparing pies and salads and barbecue chicken and puddings, all the time seething in a hot stew of resentment. I was desperate not to be doing it, to get on and write my essay, but I had to put my Best Foot Forward.
In the end, about twenty minutes before they arrived, I managed to dash upstairs and log into the university library. I managed nearly ten minutes before Mark interrupted me, shouting up the stairs to find out what I wanted to be done with the potatoes under the grill, and wondering if he should take the pie out of the oven.
I find it impossible to concentrate when my attention is being tugged back to banality, sometimes being married reminds me of Ritalin Boy’s visits in his extreme youth, so I gave up with a heavy sigh and returned to the kitchen.
They arrived not long afterward. They did not know where to park the car, and so Mark and the chap went off outside to unload their bags and store the car tidily in the car park.
This led to another tragedy.
I installed my best welcoming smile and asked the lady what she might like to drink.
She said White Wine.
Do you know where this is going?
We had but one bottle of white wine chilling in the fridge, actually only one bottle of white wine in the whole house.
It was a beautiful expensive bottle of Sancerre.
Do you remember that one?
I bit my lip and smiled merrily. I uncorked it and poured her a glass. Then the chaps came back and they thought they would like white wine as well.
I had promised that I would be the one who would drive down the hill and collect Oliver from work later on, and so I had agreed not to drink.
I poured myself a glass of water.
I filled everybody’s glasses, and then smilingly refilled them again a little while later, and before any time had passed at all, the bottle was empty.
Not the smallest taste was left.
Mark and his third cousin twice removed, or whatever the chap was, sat and chatted happily about sheep farming and tractors, I smiled and nodded and thought that perhaps it was a good job I had stayed sober because my sense of humour can become quite bitterly cynical when I have allowed myself to grow intoxicated. Then I cleared the table and filled the dishwasher, washed the pots and put the leftovers in the fridge, thinking grimly that at least it was better than trying to look interested in pistons.
I sat on the stairs with poor Roger Poopy for a while, who is too lost in grief to be interested in visitors, and then went back to listen to stories about how various other cousins had progressed with their sheep-farming careers, and recent New Zealand legislation which was altering the course of land-management.
I went to collect Oliver, who politely declined to come in, because there is a girl who lives just across the road and he thought that she might be more interesting company.
I came in by myself but they were all drinking the chap’s whisky by then, and nobody offered me any, so I drank some more water and considered ways in which I might substitute a specimen bottle.
They went to bed after that, because they are still jet-lagged. I thought I might make a start on my assignment but I am too out of sorts even to think about it.
Maybe tomorrow when I have made breakfast and cleared up and stripped the sheets and towels out of their room.
Sometimes it is very hard to be good.
