It is almost midnight and I am only just starting to write to you.
I meant to write earlier, but when I picked up the computer to begin composing pages of gripping autobiography, I discovered that a university submission I had believed I had weeks and weeks to complete, was due in by midnight.
I can hardly tell you how irritating customers are when they want to go somewhere and you are frantically trying to meet a deadline.
Of course I met the midnight deadline. Obviously I had already done the work, it was just a matter of composing it into the appropriate shape, adding a synopsis and some introductory words, and working out how on earth to add 1.5 line spacing to a Word document.
This last was the bit that took the longest.
Anyway, I managed it, without even being hideously rude to any interrupting fat nuisance who wanted to go just round the corner where they would walk if only it wasn’t for their bad leg. I am a person of more self-control than I had thought.
There was no excuse really, because I have being writing things for most of the day. Mark has said that he wants me to get my dissertation story done and out of the way, and so he disappeared out from under my feet to be outside under the car. I sat in the office and chewed my fingernails and ate chocolate buttons, absent-mindedly, whilst contemplating the various arcane philosophies I am trying to condense into an exciting contemporary adventure.
It has been a pleasant day. I like writing things.
Also we had just got to the middle of the afternoon when Oliver arrived home. Of course we were expecting him, on and off whenever we remembered, and he turned up just before we started to get ready for work, with a very great deal of luggage and lots of stories about school. His housemaster has told him that he is not supposed to be travelling up and down in his own car, but I think basically his housemaster is just going to have to put up with it, they can hardly expel him at this stage, and it is saving us two hundred quid every time, not to mention the two or three days when we can’t go to work. I shall have to compose a letter, although it will have to wait until I am feeling a little more politely apologetic. Anything I am likely to say in my current argumentative frame of mind will probably not be very helpful.
Anyway, his arrival signifies the commencement of the Easter holidays, and the very beginning of the Lake District tourist season. This is good because it means that all of the endless traffic-lit roadworks will probably disappear soon, but a nuisance because it will mean that visitors will keep pinching our parking space.
He thinks he might accept the place at Norland.
After he arrived and his laundry had been stuffed into the washing machine, everything became a frantic rush of getting picnics ready for work. I do not know how it happens, but when I am by myself it takes me about five minutes to get ready for work. I make a cup of tea and a cheese sandwich and collect a bag of chocolate buttons and the preparations are complete. When Mark is there as well it takes me about an hour. Include Oliver in that and we were thoroughly late.
I do not understand why this might be.
I am going to leave you now. It is long past the witching hour and you have heard all of the most exciting highlights of my day. Also I am fed up of drunk people and would like to go home to bed.
I will see you again on Sunday.
Until then.
PS. I have attached a picture of our geranium for your entertainment.
