Well, we have arrived.
We have not only arrived, we are in a very comfortable hotel and as I write these very words I am sitting on a very comfortable bed.
The hotel room is easily bigger than a whole floor of our house, and apart from the massive bed, all that is in it is a couple of cupboards and a bathroom. The wardrobe is not nearly big enough, but hotel wardrobes never are, they never seem to consider that you need a colossal amount of luggage even just for a couple of days’ stay, and our suitcase probably weighed as much as Mark. We have got clean clothes and shoes and coats and suits and gowns and hoods and all sorts of other clutter, it is a good job I did not live in the days when you had to bring everything with a horse and cart.
All the same it is a very nice hotel and I am feeling contentedly in my element.
We did not start the day in a nice hotel. We started the day at Lucy’s house which is not at all the same thing, not least because she closed her bedroom door in order to exclude poor disappointed Roger Poopy, and he lay on the landing outside and cried forlornly all night. Even when we shouted at him to belt up he could only contain his grief for about half an hour at a time before it leaked out all over again.
Halfway through the night Lucy discovered that when she closed the bedroom door she had failed to notice that the cat was on the inside of it. The cat needed a bathroom visit in the middle of the night and couldn’t get out. At four o’ clock Lucy woke up from a terrible nightmare that the cat was pooing on the bedroom carpet only to find that her dreams had indeed come true. She and Jack got up wearily to clean it up and then had to eject Roger Poopy all over again.
Jack was starting a brand new job this morning. I think it likely that he might not have given it his cheery best.
I am not sorry to be here and not there. Poor Lucy and Jack.
Once Jack had gone to work we started the day with an exciting breakfast in the cafe across the road from Lucy’s house. This turned out to be a satisfactorily robust start to the day, and my egg and bacon sandwich cost an astoundingly reasonable £2.50 and the lady even smiled when she served us. If I lived there I would probably eat there every morning and be as round as a small barrel before I had even finished painting the kitchen.
I am feeling uncomfortably rounded as it is. I think I must have eaten about six thousand calories today, because after breakfast we had a cream-cheese-and-Wensleydale picnic on the journey, and then a glorious sugary cocktail in the bar when we arrived, and then an enormous fried dinner followed by chocolate brownie pudding, and then even after all that lot we still had hot chocolate before bed.
Mea culpa. All of these chocolate-button-free months wasted in one magnificent scoff.
All of it was splendid but it is a good job my bat gown doesn’t need to be fastened anywhere, because I have not done even the smallest exercise either, because of being in the car all day.
The point of being on holiday is not to think about these things, and so I am trying hard not to. I will save my guilt for when it is too late at home next week, and then make myself miserable gazing at my wobbling bits in the mirror and noting my misfortunate resemblance to a dish of blancmange.
One does not need to spoil a holiday with such guilty recollections, however, and so I am going to put them resolutely out of my thoughts.
In any case it would be a terrible shame to waste the magnificent Full Cooked English Breakfast Included tomorrow.
That would be a true tragedy.
