Well, goodness, things move on at a jolly hasty pace in our non-stop go-go world.
We are not only home, we have got Ritalin Boy visiting us, and we have got visitors coming for dinner tomorrow night and so have spent the entire evening making cheesecakes, curry and ice cream.
To begin at the beginning, because as you might remember, last night I went to bed in the camper van, with some cats leaping on my sore foot every fifteen minutes. We woke up to discover that one of them had actually leaped out of the open window, and was mewing piteously in the rain outside, which Lucy said served her right, although when they asked in her job application if she was compassionate she had pretended that she was.
Of course you are dying to know how she got on in her interview, and I am pleased to be able to tell you that she seems to have done very well indeed. Of course there are many potential slips between saying a cheery Good Morning in an interview, and Which Is My Desk some time later, but they finished up by assuring her that she would fit into the team very well, and that they would now get on with the vetting process, which of course they wouldn’t bother about if she wasn’t thoroughly in the running, so it is looking very hopeful.
Oldham’s villains had better jolly well watch out, that is all I can say.
Grandma lent her a sophisticated-looking cardigan and a scarf, and she looked very nice indeed. I never look sophisticated even when somebody else has lent me their entire wardrobe. I look like a scruff who happens to be wearing a smarter person’s clothes. I do not know how this happens but it does.
Lucy did not. She looked pretty and responsible and exactly like somebody who would be a splendid CID officer some time soon.
We all debriefed, over cake and coffee, and then headed our separate ways, leaving my parents with a ringing silence and a huge pile of washing up. Mark fixed the windscreen wipers on the camper van whilst Lucy was being interviewed. This was fortunate because it rained a lot on the way home.
We chugged back into the alley to unload. This took ages because of deciding to wash all of the sheets so the beds needed stripping, but also because I am not high-speed at the moment. We were about halfway through when a cross man came to the door and told us that he wanted to drive down the alley so we had to move the van out of his way.
We said we would be ten minutes so he would have to hang on, or drive down it the other way, which would take him less than a minute, and he explained, in a haughtily middle-class way, that he lived in the house just a little way along and we could jolly well get our peasant camper van out of his alley.
We laughed, because he was on his holidays, as we knew perfectly well, and obviously he had no idea that people really live in the Lake District, and imagined we were just passing gypsies.
I can accept that this is not an unreasonable conclusion.
He was quite shocked to discover the true state of affairs, and glared at Mark later whilst he was hauling firewood into the yard and they were going out to do tourist things in the village.
We did not help our cause when Number One Son-In-Law turned up a little while later, in his beaten up van, with which he also blocked the alley.
He had brought Ritalin Boy. We like to see him. He thinks it is very amusing to have a grandparent with a sore toe, and played some I’m Going To Poke It games later, which he found led to some personal discomfort.
He dived off upstairs with Oliver and we went to Booths for some ethical pizzas for their dinner. I remembered then that we had got some friends coming to dinner tomorrow evening, so we set to do the things that could not wait until tomorrow, like making ice cream and cheesecake.
It seems to have been a very busy day. I am in bed now and Mark is going to work tomorrow whilst I finish off making dinner and washing sheets.
I hope it does not rain. There is an awfully lot of laundry.
