I have mentioned that we have got visitors coming for dinner on Tuesday.
The visitors in question are my parents, who are bringing with them my uncle and aunt, who live in America, and whom I haven’t seen for the last thirty six years. They were all arriving in the Lake District today, to stay at the very splendid hotel which houses the PamperMe WellPerson WholeLoveliness Health Spa, where we were due to meet them for coffee this afternoon.
My parents don’t really need much impressing, if it is true that the first thirty seconds of meeting somebody are all that it takes to form an everlasting opinion then probably in their minds I will always be a bit helpless and undignified.
However my uncle and aunt are a different matter, and added to which if I mess it up and get accidentally drunk and tell rude jokes, or fail to notice that the cats have pooed under the table, or cook something ghastly about which they have got to be polite, then my mother will be decidedly sniffy about it.
Therefore some best behaviour, good cooking and a tidy house were called for, and I spent some time impressing this on Mark whilst we were having our start-of-day coffee this morning, because he does not always grasp the finer points of entertaining. Also he made an enormous mess in the kitchen yesterday and I wanted him to understand that there would be unhappy consequences if it was still there when our guests turned up tomorrow, but he was unmoved by my concerns and made some indecent propositions for things that I could do which might put him in the mood for building works, but I didn’t believe him at all, and so I declined.
I went off to do my school run and when I came back things were actually quite considerably better, there was hardly any sand and cement in the kitchen at all, and he took his drills and bits of plank off out to the shed again, and I could get to the sink and wash up the rather unpleasant pile of gritty cups, which was splendid.
The plan for the day was that we would tootle around the house in the morning, meet my parents at their hotel for a mid afternoon coffee and then go to work: so everything we were going to achieve had got to be done by lunchtime, then tomorrow we would have a leisurely day finishing things off and then excel ourselves in the evening with a magnificent performance as hosts with an immaculate house, a splendid dinner and civilised behaviour.
It started to go wrong when Ritalin Boy’s Other Grandma sent me a text saying that she had got to go into hospital and would I look after Ritalin Boy, starting tomorrow, until his father returned from sea, which might be tomorrow but she wasn’t sure.
If you have read this diary before then you will know about Ritalin Boy and no further explanation is necessary. If not, then I will simply observe that immaculate, splendid and civilised are not words that you would ever consider using to describe any gathering that had Ritalin Boy in it.
Mark said to worry about Ritalin Boy tomorrow, which was a long way off, and that I had got more than enough to think about with today’s events.
I had already got into a bit of an organisational muddle with the whole thing. I had condensed all my lists into one master list, which included shopping and Things To Do, and I had planned my time quite carefully to get it all covered. We were almost at lunchtime before I realised that the one thing that I had absolutely forgotten to include in any list anywhere was preparation of the shepherd’s pie, and as things stood at the moment we were going to have an ace starter and pudding and bread and cheeseboard and beetroot crisps, but I had completely forgotten to provide a main course. I dragged Mark to Morrisons with me to help me not come apart at the seams whilst I was trying to buy shepherd’s pie ingredients, and then stood there helplessly not having the slightest idea what I had come for.
Whilst I was trying to decide if I had bought carrots in Asda already, which Mark explained that I couldn’t have done, since I hadn’t been to Asda, the phone rang, and it was my mother.
“Hello,” she said cheerfully, “We were just passing through on our way to the hotel and thought we would pop in for a coffee with you. We’re just parking the car.”
We threw some money at the lady behind the counter and tore home as fast as we could. Mark hurled planks and rusty things and axle stands and the spare gearbox into the back of his car, which was just about the only out of sight place that we could think of, and I hoovered up sawdust and cement and shook the tablecloth and chucked all the rubbish in next door’s dustbin since ours was full, and by the time they appeared at the gate we had a fairly close approximation of a tidy house, although we were both a bit guiltily out of breath.
It was lovely to see them.
