I can’t quite work out what I have been doing, but I just can’t seem to get my act together today.
Somehow, I am bone-achingly, mind-numbingly tired. I think I have become suddenly elderly, starting around eight o’clock this morning.
I have no business to be tired, since I spent most of yesterday sitting around, either in a car or watching the dance show, but I am.
I am sitting in the taxi, yawning and trying not to nod off. I am going to stop writing very quickly and contemplate having a short snooze.
I did not help my own cause by waking up early, and then lying awake worrying about things. I can’t remember now what I was actually worrying about, but it must have seemed important at the time. Probably about whether or not I had remembered to put the washing machine on.
It seems to be a season for worrying. Poor Lucy has got car insurance and a new boiler to be paid for. Oliver has got to support himself in Manchester whilst he is learning to be a bouncer next week, and Mark has got two more weeks of expensive offshore courses to do.
Oliver is resolving this difficulty and raking himself in some cash by cleaning in a pub this weekend. I was rather impressed with this, since I do not have any recollection that he has ever in his life cleaned anything much more complicated than his teeth. Certainly the intricacies of cleaning pub toilets have hitherto been lost on him, although for twenty quid an hour he is learning fast. I would think that the thing he is learning most thoroughly is that it is really important to listen at school.
Lucy is determinedly managing her massive moving expenses with a series of spreadsheets. Every expenditure, every potential disaster, has been thoughtfully foreseen and an appropriate budget-modification created. I am impressed with this as well, since it is more than I have ever managed. A series of haphazard lists, with items crossed out as the funding has eventually turned up, has always been my management strategy. When I can’t afford something, my usual means of financial management has been to try not to think about it, unless it is something important like a teapot, in which case it quickly comes to possess my every waking thought.
Mark has been offered an offshore job for a few weeks at the end of the month, conditional upon him completing and passing his two training courses. He leaves for the first one on Sunday. It is in Aberdeen, because the Gods do not do travel coordination when it is obviously far more entertaining to do terrifying solitary midnight adventures. Of course I am just back from the far North, and will be setting off to go that way again two days after he has returned.
Fortunately I was not solitary last night. I had got Oliver.
It appears that I am going to be fairly solitary for the next few weeks, though. They will all be disappearing, and I will be by myself, apart from the dogs.
As it happens, there are loads of them at the moment.
I think you are about to be visited with lots of very similar diary entries for a while, with many near-identical stories of firewood-sawing and dog-emptying Coming Soon To A Screen Near You.
At any rate, I hope so. I have had enough adventures for the moment.
I did not have any adventures today, unless you count the laundry, being my laundry, Oliver’s laundry, and Mark’s laundry, collected during all of our separate absences and which kept the washing machine clunking busily for the whole of the day.
There was even some laundry for the dogs, collected when I noticed the revolting smell of their blanket.
I was glad that nothing more troubling presented itself, because I have been far too dozy to manage any more complicated crisis. I have occupied most of the day stumping around wondering if it might just be all right to sit by the fire with another cup of tea, just for ten minutes.
It has been ages since my last customer.
I might just have a little snooze now, before the next one turns up.
