Watch this space

Some friends of ours are thinking of buying a camper van, and this morning I made the terrible mistake of taking them for a guided tour of ours.

This was a mistake because as soon as I walked in through the door I was seized by the agonising longing to jump in it and drive away.

I wanted to be somewhere else. Probably the seaside. Blackpool, perhaps, with the rest of the middle classes. Or Scotland. Anywhere, actually, but most especially somewhere with sand and sea and a parking space.

I had not even known that I was nurturing this yearning, but it turned out that I was. A longing for our little camper van life, with our stories and our leopard skin seats and red-and-white spotted kettle, crept up and washed over me, like an unexpected wave when you are asleep on the beach and your children think it might be funny not to wake you up.

We could not have run away tonight anyway, because Oliver has got school and the camper ban has got a blocked fuel filter. Mark says he has got another fuel filter saved up for that very purpose, and will get round to changing it soon. I expect this will be ten minutes before we are due to set off to somewhere important in it.

We are stuck with school, though. Fortunately the term will be finishing a bit early, which will be wonderful. Oliver has become completely sick of lessons-without-friends, and I have got sick of getting up at seven in the morning. If we are to go back to work at any time soon we are going to have to readjust our body clocks. Also we will have to consider starting to drink less.

I will worry about that one nearer the time.

I wanted to go on holiday anyway, although I have no idea if it would be allowed. I have stopped following the details of what is legal and illegal any more, and have instead substituted a calculation of what anybody in authority is likely to notice or care about. Having a daughter in the police force has caused me to reassess my conceptions of the things the police think are important. Most important of all seems to be not filling in paperwork, especially at the end of a shift. If you are planning to commit a crime you might wish to consider this.

I daydreamed about the camper van on and off all day, in between stages of my important project of the day. This was the manufacture of a surprise birthday cake for Mark, whose birthday is tomorrow. I can tell you about this here without any anxiety about spoiling the surprise, because he does not read these pages, at least, not unless he is very bored indeed and there is nobody on YouTube giving little lectures about different sorts of boilers.

It is a chocolate cake with raspberries and cream, and was my first major creative adventure in my new kitchen. This was both wonderful because of the work surfaces being at a perfect height, and rubbish because I have forgotten where I have put everything.

I spent ages looking for the tea towels this morning, before finally remembering that I had put them in the drawer at the far side of the unit. Mark and Oliver had looked in the drawer the day before and made comical remarks about it being Mummy’s own personal drawer, because all it contained was headache tablets and six bags of giant chocolate buttons. This reminded me that there was still a great deal of valuably unused storage space, and so I stored the tea towels in there and then forgot all about them.

I found them later when I thought I would like some chocolate buttons for a late breakfast. I was pleased about this because of having had a morning of wiping my hands on my trousers.

The cake things had been carefully stored in the places where I thought they would be most usefully accessible, but I had still forgotten where those might be, and indeed, had forgotten about one cupboard completely, despite it being right next to me.

It is going to take some getting used to, but it is a lovely kitchen.

It does not have water in it yet, that is still at the other side of the house in the old sink, but it won’t be long.

As greater men than me have already said today: watch this space.