We have made a bit of a pig’s ear of today, I am afraid.
It went completely wrong the minute I opened my eyes, and realised it was a quarter past one in the afternoon.
This is not a good start to the day.
Also I was still sleepy, so all of the rushing about, trying to cram a morning’s labours into three or four minutes, did not go particularly well either.
We must have slept for eleven hours.
This is probably no bad thing, with New Year coming up. I know that this is a time of celebration for the rest of the world, but for us it is just a night at work, and an especially tiresome one at that.
I do not mind being at work. It is considerably cheaper than celebrating, and does not generally leave you with a headache in the morning, but of course we are very much looking forward to Thursday, when it will all be over.
We will still be working on Friday and Saturday, of course.
Oliver is going on Sunday.
I only found this out this morning, and was quite disappointed, we seem to have rushed so much this holidays we have barely done more than fall over one another at the cooker. It would have been nice to have had another few days for our own holiday once all of the tourists had buzzed off, but it is not going to work like that. Oliver is going back to Bath and Mark is going off to Lucy’s to help with her house building and car repairs.
I will be on my own again.
I suppose this is probably just as well, I have got lots of things to do that have been neglected over the holidays. Today, for example, was Clean Sheets Day. Since we had barely crawled out of them by the middle of the afternoon they are still dangling damply over the fire. We will have clean sheets, if slightly damp ones, but I have neither dusted nor hoovered.
I am cross with myself about this because everywhere is becoming fluffy.
Instead of dusting and hoovering we dashed up to Booths. Mark has been fixing Oliver’s car and wanted to try it out, so we went in that, but it was awful. There were people everywhere, I mean everywhere. There was a complete trolley log jam all around the aisles, and the car park was so crowded that on the way back I left Mark with the car and the shopping and dived over the fence at the back of the car park to climb down the banking and walk home. This is undignified but a lot faster, and I had hung up all of the washing before he appeared, and even when he did finally appear he had to spend ten minutes explaining to our new next door neighbours how you park the car in their drive.
Suddenly, after a very quiet Christmas, Windermere is heaving with people. It is like having been dumped in the middle of Terminal One in the middle of a baggage handlers’ strike. It is not nice.
Booths had almost sold out of things. We have had to buy the Wrong Tomatoes, and they did not have salad onions. I do wish all of these visitors would do their shopping back in Preston before they turn up. There is a perfectly good Booths down there, they do not have to rinse ours clean.
Still, it bodes quite well for an evening at work.
We are hoping for a busy few days.
I should warn you in advance that there will be no writing on these pages tomorrow. I usually write at work, of course, and it becomes superbly irritating to try and compose entertaining prose between idiots banging on the window and wishing to transport their bad legs back to the first three syllables of Aphrodite’s Lodge.
I will see you on the Other Side.
LATER NOTE: After all that I am going to end on what we call in the writing trade a Cliff Hanger. It is when something terrible and thrilling has just happened and we all have to wait with bated breath to see how it turns out.
It is a real Cliff Hanger because I have got no more idea than you how it will end up.
My car has broken down, on the last night before New Year’s Eve the busiest night of the year.
The alternator has packed up.
Mark put the jump leads on it and charged it on the taxi rank so I could keep going, but it was to no avail, and by ten o’clock I was obliged to limp home, with not much in the way of lights, and barely any steering.
Will he get it fixed in time?
Tune in to the next thrilling instalment on New Year’s Day to find out…
