It has been an unexciting day, and I am sitting on the taxi rank trying to find a way of turning it into an amusing and entertaining read. So far I have not been terribly successful.
This is because in my inner soul I am marking time until we can run away in the camper van on Monday night. I am not having happy interesting adventures in the meantime. I am virtuously doing all of the tiresome things that I don’t want to do. This is in order that before we leave, I can clear both my conscience and the overdraft.
We are still on holiday.
Obviously we are on holiday in the being on the taxi rank sort of way, but we have still only been doing the one job, and since it is Sunday we are going to finish at midnight, so it is hardly like working at all.
Apart from coming out to work, today we have cleaned the house.
Really I should have done this last week, but somehow time for housework did not really happen, and I didn’t, so everything was sticky and a bit fluffy. Also, the children’s rooms needed making up for their return, which is happening soon. They have got one more exeat and then it is the summer.
Already it is summer.
We opened every single window in the house today, as widely as they would go. We made our house tidy and fresh and bright, so we can leave it behind us on Monday night, and then be glad to come back on Thursday.
Number Two Daughter and Mrs. Number Two Daughter (Common Law) did not stay at home and clean, partly because I am not yet entirely confident about their domestic capabilities, and partly because they did not make almost all of the mess. They went off to Appleby Fair to see the gypsies.
They almost bought a horse, but could not fit one into the car. Also they took Roger Poopy with them, and he does not like horses.
Instead they bought me a pretty china jug which I have put on the dresser. I like the jug but secretly I might have been pleased with a horse. I am not allowed to buy a horse because I hardly have time to walk the dogs, but in my imaginary world one day when we are old we will have a little bungalow. It will be right next to the shops, for convenience, obviously, but it will have a large garden and field at the back of it, where Mark can invent things in an ivy-covered shed, and I can have a horse.
Mark says that horses are awful for fields and I know that he is right, but I am allowed to have any daydream that I like, and I have defiantly included a rosemary hedge, a thatched roof and a gypsy caravan in this one, also a couple of tamed crows and a cat that doesn’t smell. I do not have to include dogs, because they are there anyway. It is misfortunate that even in the daydream I have got to be at least seventy, and hence probably I had better daydream some replacement hips as well.
The nice thing about being seventy in the daydream is that a cheerful Young Person comes round and does the cleaning every morning, probably provided by the council, although I have not quite thought that one through yet.
I would have liked a Young Person today. I did not want to clean. I wanted to be making the camper van ready to run away.
It is very soon now.
The picture is Oliver, who sloped off when Matron was not looking to play football. The results of this were exactly what anybody might have predicted.
He has been imprisoned on her couch ever since.
