Well travelled

Somehow we have made it back to the taxi rank.

It seems to have been another very long day.

We were woken up when Lucy banged on the camper van door at seven o’clock this morning. We had come to this arrangement because she had been working all night and needed to wake us up when she got home. Very thoughtfully she showered and changed and got herself ready for departure before she disturbed us, after which there was some groaning and staggering until we managed to get ourselves re-loaded with all of Lucy’s things as well as all of Oliver’s things, including, of course, the ever gentle and compliant kitties.

By that I mean that they were villains at every possible opportunity. There was at least one moment on a service station when I caught one of them by the tail after it had clawed its way up the bottom half of the door and was about to launch itself into the path of an oncoming truck. They investigated everything and ate everything that they thought we wouldn’t notice them eating. In the meantime, just in case we paid too much attention to the cats, Rosie chewed off the bottom of the table leg. It is still the same length but considerably less beautiful than it was. We don’t look at it very much so it doesn’t matter, but it was tiresome anyway. Picking splinters out of a carpet never becomes a happy event.

Lucy went to bed, and Oliver, who was very jet-lagged, did the same. I drove the camper and Mark drove Lucy’s car, and we hauled up the motorway, our first stop being a house Lucy was going to look at, and maybe even buy. It was slow going in the camper van, and we reached it just in time, only to find the road had been closed, and we had to hurtle into some back streets, park and run.

By this means we accidentally took the dogs with us. By good fortune the cats were not quick enough to realise what was happening and we left them in the van.

The house was in an awful state, so filthy that I worried about the dogs paws on the carpets in exactly the inverse of the way I worry about them at home. Still, we thought that probably a skip would sort most of it out, until we realised that actually it was not just a house by itself. Not only was it next to what had once been a pub and was now flats, it actually had a flat in its attic, belonging to somebody else.

We could hardly believe that we had not noticed this, but we hadn’t. We had looked and looked at pictures of it, and not only had Lucy been for a poke around the back garden whilst in Manchester a few weeks ago, so had my parents, and none of us had noticed that there was another set of windows on top of the upstairs ones.

The house had once been part of the pub, and a big, bricked-up archway stood between them. I thought it must have been rather fine once, although obviously it isn’t now. Mark said that it is a rubbish idea to have somebody else own your roof, and we all agreed, although when we talked about it later Lucy thought she might still like to live there, so she put in a ridiculously low offer for the house, and we will see what happens. I don’t suppose they will accept it but if they do then she will have a jolly good bargain.

After that Mark and Lucy dashed off for Lucy’s medical appointment, and Oliver and I chugged off up the motorway to wait for them on a service station.

They turned up half an hour after we did. We had an enormous lunch and set off for home, and somehow the whole shebang took so long that as we were unloading the camper van I looked at the clock and realised that it was six o’clock and we should have started work ages ago.

It all became a bit of an undignified scramble then, but we made it.

So here I am.

I am on the taxi rank in the pouring rain.

There probably won’t be any diary for a couple of days, bank holidays are just too busy as it is.

I will see you on the other side.