Elton John

It was quite difficult to find the right frame of mind for work last night.

Yesterday was a splendid day of self-congratulatory fizz drinking at Oliver’s school with my parents, with lots of important people reminding us how very clever and discriminatory we were for sending our boys there, which is always flatteringly pleasant to hear. By the end of the day we were glowing with happy pride at our own wonderfulness, the school’s wonderfulness, and Oliver’s startling achievements of having made a felt collage and a wooden paddle steamer.

After that we had to go belting off home and get ready for work. Oliver helped us to unload the camper van, which led to a minor disaster when I came to making sandwiches to take to work later on and made the startling discovery that he had absent mindedly put all the salad in the freezer and not the fridge.

Mark staggered off straight out to work, and I organised our flask of tea and sandwiches made from the leftovers of the picnic and deposited Oliver with his best friend Harry.

Harry is the youngest of a robustly noisy family of four brothers. They have an amicable domestic arrangement where they spend half of their lives with their mother and half with their father, which must be handy for the continued sanity of both parents. From our point of view one pleasing consequence of their having quite so many boys all over the place is that they are very generous about not minding when there is another one around, so if we are working and we have got Oliver at home he often stays with them.

In the end we worked until about five, and collapsed blearily into bed, where we stayed until Harry’s dad returned the boys at about lunchtime, having first fed them an enormous Sunday breakfast of sausages and bacon and scrambled eggs, which I followed up shortly after with a large stack of creamy pancakes.

We couldn’t both work then because of having a house full of boys, so Mark went off to make us some cash whilst I spent the remainder of the day sorting out washing and picnic debris and trying to restore our lives back to a state of order after two days of adventure, which was a nice reassuring thing to do, and I watered the plants and explored the new growth in my garden and pegged clean clothes on the line and pottered about feeling a home-like tranquillity contentedly seeping back into my soul.

Mark went out when he came back from work. My friend Elspeth had called earlier on this week to ask if I would like to go and see Elton John, who is making an astonishing and presumably all-time-one-off appearance at Kendal Show Ground.

It is the first time ever as far as I can remember that anybody I have ever heard of other than our local MP has made an appearance in Kendal, and although we had heard that it was happening I hadn’t actually believed it, assuming that it would be somebody else round and balding just doing an impersonation.

I turned out to be wrong, and Elspeth assured me that in fact it was the Great Man Himself, presumably doing a tour called Rubbish Places That Nobody Ever Bothers To Tour And Now I Know Why.

This put me on the horns of a dilemma, because I don’t particularly like Elton John, certainly not enough to shell out my hard earned cash for a ticket anyway, but nevertheless felt that if nobody bothered to go and see him he would probably tell all his celebrity friends and then nobody else would ever come to entertain us after that and it would be all my fault.

Therefore I felt that I owed it to Kendal’s cultural future to make an appearance, also that I had a Best Friend’s Duty to accompany Elspeth who wanted to go quite badly, but whose husband had given a short laugh and refused point blank: however my dilemma was solved when Mark had said thoughtfully: “Oh, Elton John, how splendid, what a brilliant thing to do, you’ll like it,” which enabled me to correct him and come up with a perfectly satisfying solution, with the end result that he went off to bop around with my best friend at an Elton John concert, and I stayed at home with Oliver, feeling relieved to have found such a tidy outcome, and enjoying being in a house that has got a boy in it.

They are not back at the time of writing, but rang me from the car park afterwards, predictably full of post-concert euphoria at having had such a wonderful time in Kendal, who’d have thought it? how amazing to see him here, in our very own town! so with any luck it worked and Elton John will go off back to his fairytale palace and tell lots of other famous people that Kendal is actually worth a concert and to give it a go.

I didn’t have a photograph of Elton John to put at the top so I put one on of the garden, which I am aware I have often done before, but I can tell you it isn’t easy to find a new inspirational photographic idea every day so you will just have to be understanding. In fact it is the lovely climbing thing by the back door that has flowered dramatically in the last few days, and is making me feel pleased every time I pass it, and next to it are Mark’s hanging baskets, which are having the same effect.

I hope I can stay awake until he manages to get back.