Goodness me, it has been a difficult sort of day: although I am pleased to say that at last it is having a happy ending.
Things have been going wrong.
They started going wrong yesterday when I got burnt out. Last night when I finished writing to you, we slept for six whole hours all at one go, not with an interruption in the middle to go to work or anything. Even despite this, when we woke up we were still both sleepy, and still burnt out.
This was not brilliant, because Mark had his GCSE maths paper this morning.
I packed his things up so that he could go on to work afterwards, and he buzzed off.
I went on my run.
Halfway round I had a dreadfully distressed phone call from Mark saying that Kendal had closed all the bridges around Burneside and that the traffic had come to a standstill. He said that he had not moved an inch for ten minutes.
He turned around and went around some back roads but got stuck behind other people doing the same thing. In the end the traffic was just too bed, and he was late, along with a lot of other candidates.
We worried about this the first time he took an exam, which was why we stayed in Kendal, but this time Mark had got to go on to work, and so we couldn’t.
It takes ten minutes to get from our house into Kendal at night when there is no traffic.
Mark set off three quarters of an hour early this morning but he was still late.
He called me when the exam was over to tell me about it.
He had only been only a couple of minutes late, so that didn’t matter, but of course by the time he sat down to read the paper he had been panicking for ages. He had been feeling sick with the horror of it all, and when he finally started the paper he realised that he was awfully shaken, and found it almost impossible to calm himself down.
He said that he could hardly read the questions when he started, and when he did work them out he kept thinking of the wrong ways to get to the answers.
He was cross with himself and unhappy. I wanted him to come home, but he said that he had got important rural broadband things that he must do.
In the end he said that he would do the most important things and then stop.
Half an hour later he rang back to say that we had both had enough, and we were tired, and everything was too difficult, so we were going to have a break after all. He had rung the intrepid yachtsman and explained that he was going to stop installing rural broadband. He was going to shirk off home and was not coming back for a week.
By this time I was baking things, which is a tiresome thing to be doing on a hot day.
I had made a coffee cake and some caramel shortbread before he came home.
We had a brief review of the current state of our lives, and concluded that they were rubbish, and that we did not wish to carry on under the present circumstances. After that we piled into the camper van with the dogs and the caramel shortbread, and headed for the sea.
I can’t tell you how utterly, completely relieved I was about this.
We are on the beach right now. It is evening. I am sitting looking out at the sunset-pink sky over the sea.
It was late in the afternoon when we got here.
There were some other camper vans here then as well, occupied by some very friendly hippies with dreadlocks and piercings and jewellery with mystic symbols. We admired their camper vans, and they admired ours, and we shared a bottle of French champagne that we had had found stuffed in a locker, before they buzzed off to a party on somebody’s allotment, and we went to walk on the beach.
The beach is very dry, drier than I have ever seen it. The sands are crusted with white salt, like pictures of African places in National Geographic. The little worm casts crunched under our feet, and the sand was set hard. It was very warm.
I have been puzzling to find a way in which I could cleverly indicate that the sand was a metaphor for my burnt out soul, but couldn’t. You will have to work that out for yourselves.
Slowly, slowly, as we walked and talked, we started to feel calmer again. The birds were calling, and the breeze was hot against our bare legs, and the smell of the sea drifted across the white sands towards us.
We had just decided that we needed to change some things in order that our lives would become balanced again, instead of exhausted and anxious and weary, when the telephone rang.
It was Oliver’s school.
Oliver, it appeared, had been accidentally broken again, this time by tripping over his own feet whilst running across the playing field. He was, Sister explained breezily, in hospital having an X Ray, and was perfectly fine.
Matron had taken him to hospital. We rang her mobile and spoke to Oliver, who said that he was perfectly fine and would be better in time for Sports Day next week, and guess what? he was going to go to MacDonalds with Matron instead of having Low Tea at school.
Matron said that he was perfectly fine, just with a sore foot, and the X Ray was just precautionary, and that he could do lessons even with a plaster cast, so our input was not at all necessary, they were just telling us so that we would know.
After all of these assurances we stopped worrying, and it turned out that he had not broken his ankle after all, merely sprained it rather badly. The doctor disagreed about Sports Day, so he will have to hold the finishing tape.
We were suddenly so exhausted that we thought we would get ready for bed, which is what we are doing next.
We are going to lie in bed in the morning.
