Going, going…

I am almost in bed.

Once again I am borrowing the last few minutes before bed to write to you whilst Mark is in the shower. I will not be writing for very long, because it is a quarter to three, and I have had enough. I have not even been to work. Mark did that whilst I flapped about here.

I have had the busiest of busy days, and another one yesterday. I have been very glad of the children’s assistance, without them I think I would be drowning in brown wrapping paper and parcel tape by now.

We have been making chocolates. They are done and wrapped and ready to post in the morning before we leave. There are even some left over, so we could also have chocolates for Christmas, except nobody wants them now. We spent all of yesterday wheezing in a cloud of icing sugar, glued to everything by fondant, and our fingers coated in melted, buttery chocolate. By the end of yesterday I did not think I would want to see another chocolate for all of the rest of my life, except that when I got to work I found some chocolate buttons in the door pocket of the taxi, and changed my mind.

Mark did not help with the chocolates. Mark was rebuilding his taxi. I might have mentioned that the alternator had packed up. This is inconvenient, especially in the run-up to New Year’s Eve.

We do not wish to break down on New Year’s Eve. It will be the last chance we get to clear the credit card.

Anyway, he stacked a new alternator on the teetering pile of credit on his Barclaycard and spent yesterday lying in a puddle bashing the alternator back in.

Today he and Oliver went to the scrapyard in Penrith to find a new bit for his car. I do not know what the bit was, something to do with a brake sensor I think. They did not find one so we will have to order one on the mighty Internet, but they had a splendid driving practice all the way to Penrith and back again. There were lots of roundabouts. Oliver needs roundabouts at the moment. They are quite tricky when you are just starting out. It is not like having a taxi sign on the roof, because then you can just dive into any lane you like and make taxi driver hand signals at anybody who objects, accelerating hard enough for the back end to slide outwards when you slow yourself down with the handbrake.

It is just as well that Mark is preparing him for his test and not me.

In the meantime Lucy and I organised her life and she buzzed off back to Policeman Training in Manchester. They are being told the things you must not do, like not posting naked photographs of themselves on social media, minimalistically attired in their own handcuffs. There is a lot of this sort of advice, presumably in the olden days policemen behaved like this all the time, and just said defensively Well Nobody Told Me I Shouldn’t.

The police are not taking that sort of risk any more and have thought of absolutely everything that policemen must not do. Reading the list to the recruits takes quite some time. It is a very long list.

It was almost nine o’clock before I got round to packing. We are going tomorrow, as soon as we get up. Actually we are going as soon as I have done all of the things I have forgotten to do today, and there are quite a few of those. Packing was very nice. Somebody who really cares about me had hung all of our clothes tidily in matching sets in the wardrobe, neatly spaced with bits of pipe lagging. Everything was pressed and ready and could just be laid neatly in the suitcase. After that I flapped around remembering things and then forgetting them again. I think I have re-remembered most things by now, we have got handkerchiefs and socks and headache drugs and phone chargers.

Nerf guns. We mustn’t forget the Nerf guns.

I have made a note to myself.

Now I can go to bed.