Home alone

It has been a quiet sort of day without any children in it.

As I write these very words, Number Two Daughter is in an aeroplane, skimming high over the surface of our little blue planet.

She has spent the last days of her visit with Number One Daughter, and rang up from the airport this morning, feeling excited and tearful in roughly equal measures.

I don’t know what she has got to cry about. She is jetting off to Australia for a second summer. Not for Number Two Daughter are the slate-grey skies and stinging autumn winds of the English Lake District in October. She is heading to springtime and warmth, and has packed her shorts.

I didn’t cry, but I would have liked to. 

I thought about her at intervals during the day. I imagined her drinking  champagne and having a little snooze in Business Class, whilst I was frowning at my computer and pouring bleach over bathrooms and whipping eggs into mayonnaise.

Apart from the cooking and the cleaning I thought that I would so some administrative things. I would have liked to do things in the garden, but Mark was installing rural broadband and there was no sunshine. 

In any case I had some urgent forms to be completed and some hitherto-ignored emails to be answered.

I made a cup of tea and stared alternately at the computer and at my calculator. Roger Poopy started at me, intently, the whole time, and occasionally whimpered to make sure that I had not forgotten that he was there, and would like to go out for a walk together. 

I had not forgotten. It is difficult to forget somebody who will not just shut up and go to sleep. I ignored him anyway.

I wrote letters and did sums and rubbed my eyes and sighed. 

Mark rang up to tell me that the rural broadband was not working properly and he would be late home.

I want downstairs and made some more tea, and absent-mindedly ate some biscuits. 

I tripped over Roger Poopy, and got cross with him. This is unfair but always seems to happen. We trip over the dogs, stand on them and make them yelp, and then shout at them for being in the way, as if they should know where I am about to walk.

I felt guilty then, and took them for a grumpily-reluctant walk around the Library Gardens, by which I mean that I was grumpy and reluctant. The dogs were neither. Roger Poopy charged about ecstatically with the wind in his ears, barking at everything, and did not want to come home.

We did come home, though. I tidied up and swept the hearth, because somebody seemed to have been chewing up kindling, in frustrated moments.

Then I went back to the letters, and the sums, and the frowning. 

Mark came home just as I was trying to work out how my prison officering holidays fitted in with the children’s school holidays, and concluding that probably they didn’t really, and we were never going to see one another ever again.

I worried about this for a while, until Mark said that it was ridiculous to feel guilty about going to work, and I remembered that the world of employment is like that. There are going to be some inconvenient times when you don’t want to bother going.

It is very troubling. It is hard not to feel guilty. I keep trying to persuade myself that nobody will really notice that I am not at home, especially if I do the shopping and leave some biscuits in the tin before  I go, but in my inner soul I know that I am Betraying My Maternal Responsibilities. This is not at all a nice thought, and is making me feel uncomfortable for quite a lot of the time.

I am perfectly well aware that this is one of those pre-equal rights things. Mark has never felt guilty about going to work ever in his life, and certainly he has never felt obliged to refill the biscuit tin first.

This is the twenty first century. I shall send them the biscuit recipe on Instagram and they can get on with it.

Mark lit the fire to warm the house through. Then we sliced fruit and bread and cheese for a picnic and went to work.

The house will be warm when we get back.

It will be quite like being in Australia.