It is ten past nine and I have had my shower and gone to bed.
Lucy is in bed and asleep already, and Mark is in the shower as I write.
It has been a very busy and exhausting day.
It was, of course, Lucy’s birthday, I have had her for twenty three years, and frankly the beginning bits were easier than this bit. Labour is all very well but there are concerned-looking people on hand to offer drugs at any arduous moments, and it does not involve endlessly trailing up and down four flights of stairs, generally carrying heavy things.
Also I was not nearly sixty at the time, which helped.
My day was made slightly less arduous because by a stroke of great good fortune I had a university lecture in the middle of it, and was compelled, with great reluctance, to stop heaving boxes of books down the stairs. Instead I had to go and sit in the camper van with a cup of tea and contemplate the difference between a fantasy novel and a magically realistic one, it was jolly hard work, I can tell you.
Anyway we have done it, or at any rate mostly done it. We have packed Elspeth’s trailer so hard that it is practically bursting at the seams, with chairs and a mattress and boxes of books and all sorts of other things, and I have so much had enough of it that I really do not like the idea of unpacking it again at the other end, frankly it would be easier just to set fire to it and buy Elspeth a new one.
Fortunately there is no other end to worry about at the moment, because she does not have a new house yet. She is going to leave the fully-loaded trailer parked outside Grandad’s shed until she has an address in which she can dump it all. In the meantime she is going to come and stay at our house. She does not know it yet but this is going to involve her Being Helpful in the frantic rush towards Christmas, it will be very useful indeed to have another pair of hands.
It has been thoroughly hard work, enlivened occasionally by curious observations from Lucy’s neighbours, who seem rather touchingly sad to see her go. It seems that they quite liked having their own resident policewoman, upon whose kindness and understanding they could rely every time they were arrested. Several of them told us how lovely she had been to them last time they were in custody, which left me feeling really rather impressed. They were all entirely friendly and nice, and none of them showed any signs of needing to be arrested today.
Indeed, we had to lug a couple of enormous chairs and some tables down the stairs for Age Concern to take away tomorrow, and several of them rallied round to take them instead to a young man who had just got his first flat up the road, but had not yet managed to amass any furnishings. They decided in the end that the flat would not be big enough for the chairs, but they took the rest, which will save some messing about tomorrow.
By seven o’clock we were actually too tired to do any more. We piled into the camper van where we celebrated Lucy’s birthday with some Prosecco and some rather burned pasta, which we all ate anyway. We had even managed a cake, actually some ethical chocolate eclairs that Mark bought from Booths in a last minute panic yesterday, but we stuck a candle in the top of one of them and sang Happy Birthday To You. Then we thought we might make social conversation but instead we collapsed into bed.
I can hardly lift my fingers to type.
I will talk to you again tomorrow.
