I would like to start by offering my grateful thanks to all those of you who offered assistance with yesterday’s numerical challenge. Even those of you who had clearly been drinking offered creative and sensible advice, and I am pleased to tell you all that armed with the methodology and the correct answer, we steamed through the other similar questions like a couple of maths genii. We may still not be en route for Eton, but at least I will not need to be embarrassed at the next Parents’ Meeting. I know from past parenting experience that if any answers turn out to be wrong, Oliver will unhesitatingly explain to the maths teacher that his mother did them.
We have not gone to work tonight. When I went to the gym earlier on, I passed eight taxis sitting gloomily in the rain on the taxi rank.
I cycled for six kilometres, rowed for two and a half kilometres, lifted some weights, swam twenty lengths, had a sauna and an ice plunge, and finished off with a boiling hot shower and a freezing cold shower before squirting myself with beautiful Penhaligon’s perfume and getting dressed in lovely clean clothes, smugly.
When I drove past the taxi rank again on my way home, not a single one of them had moved.
I was further pleased with my life when I walked back into the house to find Mark getting dinner ready, picture attached. This was ace. I am glad I am married.
He was able to cook dinner, because today for the first time in ages, we have made an expedition to Asda.
It has been a while since we did this, because of being broke, and we have been living on variations of bread and cheese for weeks. This does not matter, because I like bread and cheese, and it can be made into interesting swirly shapes or livened up with home-made chicken pate. However, Valentine’s Day last weekend, and a generous donation from my parents towards Lucy’s endless driving test expenses, has meant that we had enough money to pay off the overdraft and even some school fees, and today, joyously, we realised that we had enough left to replenish the apple juice and flour and chai tea.
Mark came with me, because Asda is a troubling place when I am by myself. It is filled with incomprehensible special offers, and every now and again they move things around, unpredictably. This is in order that you will be obliged to look at lots of unexpected things whilst you are trying to find the thing that has vanished.
The point to this is that you might then purchase something that is not on your list but that surprises you on a corner, and you like the look of it. This could be anything, like lemon flavoured olives or wasabi or special offer muesli. If you like whatever you have bought, you might write it on your shopping list for next time, and then you are trapped into purchasing wasabi for the rest of your life, all because somebody moved the tomato puree. I think this is a brilliant idea if you are a supermarket, and I would do it myself if I had one, but if you are a confused taxi driver with an overloaded trolley it is tiresome.
We filled the back of the car, and went to Kendal to purchase coffee. We buy this at a creaking ancient coffee shop that grinds the beans up for you. The smell seems to have permeated the whole place, hundreds of years of coffee and oak beams, it is splendid, and the coffee is fresh and bitter and perfect. It is an impossible luxury unless sometimes you have got to get up two hours after you went to bed. At those times it is a perfect solution.
Mark did not come in with me, but waited for me in the car. I do not think I would go to Kendal at all ever if I was a normal sort of person, because their traffic arrangements are designed to make you go round and round in as many circles as possible, before not finding anywhere to park and having to leave.
This can be entirely avoided if you have got a sign on the top of your car proclaiming that it is a taxi. Mark drove confidently through the pedestrian zone, closed to everybody except taxis, and stopped directly outside the coffee shop. He put the meter on, in case of inquisitive traffic wardens, and got his book out whilst I pottered about the town centre buying coffee and bags of almonds.
There are not many advantages to my career choices, but today, in the pouring rain, I thought that this was definitely one of them.
We have refilled all of our shelves. They are so full that even cooking dinner made hardly any difference. We can eat well for ages and ages.
We started tonight.
I am going to bed.
