Happy ever after, of course

Well, everything has, as these things always do, worked out all right.

We arrived chez my parents last night, and they were quite unreasonably pleased to see us given that we had brought three and a half tons of rusty scrap iron and a Pakistani with a truck that was too big for their driveway.

They watched the camper van being slowly dumped off the back of the truck, and then Mark borrowed their car to go and help the truck driver get back down their lane, which is completely the wrong shape for a massive truck. Indeed, they nodded and listened and then got out a bottle of spiced rum, which under the circumstances was exactly the finest thing they could have done. We drank a large measure and then staggered to bed, tipsily.

I woke up at five in the morning feeling stonily sober and terribly concerned about what might happen next, because you will recall that we did not come away just to ride on trucks, but to go on holiday, and suddenly the likelihood of that was beginning to look a little remote.

We had looked, vaguely, the night before, at camper vans for hire. Mark quite liked the idea but I hated them all, and when I woke him up this morning in order that he could share my worries, we discovered that the very cheapest would be eight hundred quid, and so we decided not to bother. I was not sorry about this. I do not in the least wish to go away in somebody else’s plastic camper van, with all of their horrid plastic glasses and polyester curtains. I like my own, with its Royal Albert china and heavy, thermal lined upholstered curtains, and everything exactly as I like it.

The problem was that our own camper van was not going.

We considered this over a flask of tea.

Then we solved the problem by booking ourselves into a Travelodge and politely wondering if we could borrow my mum’s car.

We had thought we might hire one but this was a cheaper idea.

My mum agreed, so that was a happy ever after after all, hurrah.

We insured Mark to drive it because if anything goes wrong then it will be his fault and I can be surprised and sorrowful but guiltless.

We borrowed it straight away to go over to Lucy’s house, because we are not going to Cambridge until tomorrow, and today Mark was installing a new consumer unit into the electricity. He hardly got any electric shocks at all whilst he was doing this, so that worked out well, and while he was swearing and tugging wires through little holes I cleaned up.

The house is still in a shockingly half-built state, and is leaking dust everywhere. Also the cat had got too hot and was losing hair like a very cross porcupine loses its bristles. Lucy could have made herself a new carpet out of the cat hair that came out of the hoover when I emptied it, if she happened to want a grey carpet with a pattern of plaster dust.

I swept and cleaned and dug one of the flower beds over. Somebody had hurled a couple of mirrors into it once, and it was filled with thousands of tiny but lethally dreadful shards of glass, so many that I filled a bucket with them, and probably there were still plenty left.

In fact it was a very pleasant day. Lucy’s house is lovely in the sunshine, and we opened all of the doors and windows and let the clean air blow through. You usually have got to be careful about opening the upstairs windows, because the cats are not very clever and fall out of them, I have seen them do this, they must be well down their nine lives by now but they don’t seem to learn. Fortunately, today it was warm, and both cats were too sleepy to bother, so they loafed about on the doorstep snoozing and glaring at us when we stepped over them.

My parents dropped by halfway through the afternoon, with a flask of coffee which was welcome because of course the electricity was off. Lucy had gone to work by then, and we had just about finished by the time she came home at half past eleven at night.

Mark had not been fitting circuit breakers all that time. He had been concreting some holes in the kitchen floor. This was lovely but obviously all the animals walked in them so they are concrete with paw marks.

I don’t know how they managed it, it isn’t as if the holes were anywhere they had wanted to go until then. Once they were filled with concrete none of them wanted to be anywhere else.

The cats walked it all over the work surfaces afterwards.

We have left the dogs with Lucy because we do not think they will be an asset in Cambridge.

We are going to go tomorrow after all.

What a magnificent thing to happen.

I am looking forward to it more than ever.

PS. Mark has arranged to get a new axle for the camper van as well so it is not going to die and everything is going to be all right.

Happy ever after is going to happen.