I have no idea how people manage to get their lives organised and get themselves into work looking bright and fresh and polished by nine o’ clock every morning.
It sometimes feels that no matter how hard I try it is just never going to happen before about half past two.
I had resolved that today would be a jolly good crack at the working day, an early start and I would make the most of the bank holiday tourist trade.
This was an instant failure because in the event we didn’t actually get up until eleven.
We had worked late, and the children had taken advantage of not having Matron compulsorily switching the lights off at half past eight by spending the evening eating chocolate and watching films and not going to bed until after midnight. As a result when the dog’s snoring woke me up from a peculiar dream about car parks at ten o’ clock this morning the house was still dark and quiet.
We had coffee in bed until we heard the children stirring, and then reluctantly dragged ourselves up to start organising the day.
Getting dressed was a bit of a fuss, because I have particular clothes to be worn when I know I have got a long day ahead in a taxi. I have got some trousers which I wear for the purpose which are a couple of sizes too big, which are impossible to wear for normal activity, because they keep falling down, but which are perfect for spending all day comfortably in a car. Then my shirt has got to be long enough not to ride up irritatingly at the back, and underwear has not got to be scratchy or badly fitting because I don’t want to be irritably fidgeting the whole time, and it must not be full of holes in case of an accident.
Once all these matters had been resolved to my satisfaction, and we had made the bed and made it downstairs there were children to feed, the dog to be walked and sandwiches to be made for a twelve hour shift. Then there was the washing to put on and yesterday’s washing to be folded up and put away, and the fire to be lit, and a trip to Morrisons for everything that we had run out of, like milk and bread and dog food, and then more coffee and a bread roll for breakfast, and then it was half past two and I was more or less ready to go.
Mark was not going to go to work until the evening because he was having the afternoon at home doing things to our loft to make it look nice for our coming visitors to stay in.
We have spent a lot of time doing our house up, and haven’t yet either finished the kitchen or really started the loft. This is because the loft needs some more windows putting in to it and lots of insulated board nailing up to the ceiling. We like the idea of doing this very much. The difficulty is that quite apart from the massive cash outlay and the hours and hours of work, there is an awful lot of dragging heavy things up three flights of stairs involved, and so far it appears that actually we are just too idle.
In consequence the loft was wallpapered when we first bought the house and then left alone, apart from being filled with things that we weren’t using and occasionally being occupied by Numbers One or Two Daughters when they were passing through. Then Oliver had a phase of contentedly picking and peeling wallpaper off and it all started to look a bit shabby.
We had a look at it after we had invited some people to stay, and Mark decided that some repairs and some paint were in order, and so his job of the last few days has been to try and make it look less like Cinderella’s garret and more like a penthouse, in which he has been only mildly successful because it hasn’t got enough glass and steel and clean cool white surfaces ornamented by a single orchid in a pot, and it has got a lot of peeling wallpaper, and wasn’t improved by the time when we accidentally set it on fire, and now really we want to pull it all apart and start again.
So I left Mark in charge of house transformation, and I went to work. I summoned the children to the kitchen for some guilt-minimising discussion before I left, to tell them exactly what thoughtful things I had left for them to eat, and what they needed to do, and after a few minutes of my laboured explanations Lucy interrupted me to say disbelievingly: “Have you called us all the way down here just to tell us what’s in the fridge? Because if you have then I should point out that we can work that out for ourselves just by opening the door. Was there anything important you wanted to talk about?”
I had to admit that there wasn’t, and Oliver said: “So can we be dismissed, then?”
I dismissed them and went to work.
I took the picture at work. I put it there because I liked it.
