Traveller

I am struggling to write this tonight.

The skies are ice-clear, and it is terrifically chilly. I am not cold in the taxi, because the heater is running. In fact I should really open the window, because I am peering blearily out through thick, warm wafts of sleepiness, wrapping snugly about me like cot blankets around somebody’s first baby. I think this is probably because this evening I have been to the gym. 

I have not been there for a couple of days, and shirked off for most of last week as well. Hence it was something of a pink-faced labour tonight, and I am very glad that driving a taxi, at least, does not require effortful operation of one’s limbs.

I have rowed and cycled and tugged on an incomprehensible apparatus that makes your shoulders hurt, and finally been for a swim and sauna and ice shower.

The ice shower is horrid, and I do it twice, along with a rub down with lumps of ice. The worst bit is turning it on. It is not nice to stand next to a freezing shower and knowing that despite all of your better instincts, actually you are really, truly planning to jump underneath it. Any second now. 

It is splendid when it is over and I can feel both invigorated and smug. I know that I must be thoroughly clean, because a squirt of perfume stings like the sort of antiseptic that the doctor tells you might feel a bit cold.

My wobbling leg muscles would barely propel me enough to stagger up the stairs when I had finished, but it was a satisfying moment. I am not the least bit thinner, but I felt as though I ought to be. I have become thinner in my soul, if not my bottom.

Lucy has gone back to school today. We do not quite have an empty nest yet, because Oliver does not go until tomorrow

In fact it was something of a trauma. 

We suggested that now she is a properly qualified grown up, she might like to drive herself back to school.

She did not think that she would like this at all.

It is a long way back to school. Taking her there, and then turning round and driving back again, takes me five hours, on a good day.

I suggested it again, with a rather more forceful sales pitch. Think of people who telephone you out of the blue with wonderful ideas for projects in which you might invest your pension.

Of course the problem was that it was the first time she had driven a car since the never-to-be-forgotten moment when the examiner told her that the Government accepted her competence to drive, and she need no longer be a mere pedestrian. 

She has been at school ever since, and has spent the intervening weeks becoming more and more nervous about driving all by herself, without Daddy in the passenger seat, eating biscuits and explaining the functioning of the gearbox whilst she thinks about something else. By the time today arrived, she had talked herself into a state of excruciating anxiety.

She came to sit on our bed this morning and told us all about it. It is a long way to school, and she has not driven on a motorway before.

Since she might very well be a policewoman before the end of the year, we were only mildly sympathetic. You can hardly lean in through somebody’s driver’s window and say things like: “So is there a reason the speed limit doesn’t apply to you, sonny?” if you do not have the expertise to pull out of a parking space without your mother making kindly supportive noises next to you.

In the end of course she screwed up her courage, and decided that her boundaries needed some pushing if she is not to grow up into a total weed. Better drowned than Duffus.

This afternoon we put the audiobook of A Game Of Thrones on her computer for her, and she chugged bravely off in her little car with just her satnav to keep her company.

Mark reminded me of when she was small, and insisted on having the stabilisers taken off her bicycle. We lived in a remote house in France, at the top of a big hill, and her favourite thing was to hurtle off down it, ecstatic with the joy of speed. We had to follow her in the car, because she was too fast for running, carrying a box of Germolene and plasters for running repairs. We needed them quite often.

Obviously I was biting my fingernails after that. It is a jolly long way.

I am pleased to tell you that she arrived in one, pleased-with-herself piece. Another bridge has been crossed.

The picture is Mark.

He has laid the first blocks for the new conservatory this afternoon.

I am going to bed.