The Challenge

It is very peculiar to have light coming in through the windows when we are going to bed.

It is not at all easy to get up a couple of hours later and do a school run, and it was a weary sort of start to the day. However we were jolly pleased because by the time we finished work last night we had got enough money to repay our borrowings from Oliver and to pay what we owed the bank, and so we felt mildly celebratory when we collapsed into bed, although I should perhaps clarify that we didn’t do anything celebratory on account of being both elderly and exhausted, merely went to sleep without being worried about anything, which is always very pleasant indeed.

We woke up and had a very subdued cup of coffee before we went off for our school runs, and then back to bed again as soon as we got home, where we slept very soundly indeed for several hours, although Mark was woken up at one point by a worrying snorting sound that he thought might be an intruder, but which turned out just to be the dog snoring.

No matter how late I have worked I can never quite avoid a vague sense of shame at not being out of bed until lunchtime. I don’t quite know where this has come from, clearly it is not inherited from anywhere as Lucy lacks it completely. It is disappointing to miss substantial chunks of the day, and even more disappointing to wake up with depressing hideous black bags underneath magenta coloured eyes, and the sort of crumpled face that looks as if I might have just lost a bare knuckle fight at Appleby.

In fact this is presenting us with something of a difficulty, because we have got some Events to attend this weekend which require us not to have scruffy-looking faces.

There are a couple of Events. Lucy is in a play at school on Friday night, and Oliver has got his Speech Day and Sports Day on Saturday. Both of these obviously require our attendance, polished and bright-eyed: and with at least a passable resemblance to all the other gleaming smart parents.

Since this morning we both looked rather like recovering alcoholics in their first week of sobriety we have become aware that we are going to have to do something different with the rest of the week.

With this in mind we have had to devise a careful plan of action for the next few days, which does not include working until half-past four in the morning on any one of them.

Of course we needed to do some preparation as well. We will need a picnic, some smart clothes to wear and some transport as well as  reasonably monochrome faces.

With this in mind, Mark went off  up to the farm to mend some of the worst of the holes in the camper van, because our budget does not stretch to hotel accommodation in York. We don’t at all mind this, because we love being in the camper van, and in any case people in hotels are always rude about the dog anyway, especially on the occasions where we have smuggled him in hidden underneath Mark’s jacket and hoped they wouldn’t notice.

The repairs are not just for functional purposes but also because the poor van is in need of a little sprucing up. This is partly because my parents will be accompanying us to the Events, and my mother has not ever quite managed to develop a thick enough skin to ignore the undeniable embarrassingness of the camper.

Regular readers will be aware that our camper van does not lack for embarrassment potential, because it is large, hideous, smoky and nearly forty years old. We bought it on eBay in France when we were drunk once, and Mark has been painstakingly patching its crumbling frame back together ever since.

My parents do not travel in a camper van, but a gold coloured Lexus, and I think my mother tries to pretend not to know us when we travel in convoy in the camper van behind them. Certainly she is not going to be happy to have us parking next to them in a cloud of rust particles and exhaust fumes when they are trying to look civilised at our children’s beautiful smart schools.

So Mark spent the day trying to dispatch the worst of the rust and fix the leak, and I went to work in order to earn enough money to buy some paint to make it look more respectable.

We have set ourselves a Challenge for the rest of the week.

By the time we set off on Friday, by our joint endeavours we will have repaired and painted some of the more upsetting bits of camper van. We will have made a T-shirt out of turquoise cotton jersey, also possibly a new skirt but not out of jersey, obviously.

We will have made some biscuits and a picnic to take with us, we will have earned enough money to buy fuel to get there and back and also to buy some milk and interesting cheese. We will have hoovered the mess up downstairs, done some washing and not stayed at work later than midnight on any night at all. In addition to all of this we will have neat tidy faces that can be produced in any gathering of smart parents without embarrassment.

We will see how we get on.