I am writing to you as a means of guarding myself against terrible temptation.
It is only the early evening, but I am so sleepy that my thoughts are fuzzy and the world has become one-step removed, like trying to explain a complicated takeaway order to a non-English speaker through a double-glazed window.
We have got tired.
Of course our friends came to see us last night, but actually we did not stay up terribly late, and we managed seven hours of wine-induced oblivion before the alarm went off.
I do not think that we are tired because we are hedonistic party animals. I think we have got tired because we have been trying and trying to rebuild our house in a hurry. We want to finish it before Boris decides that he can’t afford to pay everybody for doing nothing any more, and we should all go back to work as long as we don’t stand next to one another.
In short, I am yearning with my whole soul to go back to bed.
Obviously I can’t do this whilst Mark is labouring away at work. It would not be at all fair. Worse, he rang a little while ago to tell me that he is also struggling to stay awake.
He decided that it would probably be best to do non-thinking things, like stripping wallpaper off, because he knows that he has become far too dopey to do anything complicated, like installing plumbing.
I have made mayonnaise and biscuits and cooked things for dinner later, but like Mark I am just too sleepy to do anything difficult.
After a while I thought that I might do something that was sitting down, and sat at my desk for a bit of a rifle through my office In tray.
It turned out to be a good job that I had done this, because within two minutes I had discovered a forgotten letter from DVLA reminding me that Mark’s taxi needed to be taxed. It was due weeks ago, and I was guiltily surprised that we had not been arrested and marched off to prison, how terrible if he had been stopped by the Road Tax police on the way home.
He would have been a criminal, and it would have been my fault.
I was halfway through taxing the car when I was overtaken by a small domestic tragedy.
Oliver had managed to knock his laptop and break the screen.
His laptop is his most prized possession. It is a wonder and a joy. It is full of all his friends and is a gateway to lots of thrilling cyber-universes, and now it does not work.
He was very upset indeed.
We rang Daddy straight away, who thought that if we could manage to order a replacement screen he would be able to fix it. He has done enough computery things to know how to cobble a laptop together, and he thought that probably it would not be too difficult.
After that Oliver and I spent ages hunting through online lists of spare parts for the right sort of screen. I was glad that he was there, because his teenage eyes could read the model number on the underneath of the computer. This was merely a smudgy line to me, even with glasses and a magnifying glass, but Oliver just read it without hesitation.
In the end we found one and ordered it, which meant that between that and the road tax I have spent all of Mark’s wages even before he has finished earning them.
I rang him up and told him, but he was resigned. This sort of thing happens when you are married.
We will just have to try again next week.
