It is getting a bit difficult.
Over the weekend we have been illuminating our lives with both ends of the candle, and I have very quickly become unspeakably tired.
It hasn’t been by very much, not by a long chalk. We have had many, many times in our lives when we have worked until it was almost time to get up, and then crawled into the day with less enthusiasm than you might feel about an invitation to a party hosted by Sage, with speeches and without drink.
I think I must be getting old. I had forgotten quite how confusing life becomes when you don’t have quite enough sleep.
Mark doesn’t need quite as much sleep as I do, and when I called him at work today he said that he was still all right, although possibly somewhat lacking in brilliant wit and incisive insight.
I was not. Not all right, that is. I would not have recognised brilliant wit and incisive insight if they had been served up to me on a sandwich with a side order of crisps and salad. I had raced through my morning jobs and then unexpectedly, around lunchtime, felt as though somebody had tipped a lorry load of sawdust over my head.
My limbs felt heavy and my eyes were gritty, and my hands and feet icy cold. I was trying to make arrangements for the travelling week ahead, but the thoughts just would not come, and my head ached.
I had finished what I was doing, and so I crawled, fully dressed, into bed, where I slept, instantly and deeply, until the alarm woke me up an hour later, to tell me that the chicken was cooked.
I was still so fuzzy that when the alarm went off, I could not work out what it was, or where I was, and then, once I had worked that out, where Mark was. It came back slowly, but it took a while, and twice I thought that I had got up, but it turned out, to my befuddled surprise, that I hadn’t.
When I did get up I washed my face in cold water, which helped.
This was not because I was feeling especially heroic, but because, as you might remember, we only have cold water.
I went to look at the painting that I had thought I had done in Lucy’s room in the morning, and discovered to my surprise that I had not finished it at all, but painted a corner of the ceiling and then a bit of the wall. Clearly I had become distracted halfway down and forgotten, and my imagination had filled in the gaps, although not the paint.
Either somebody has been going around masquerading as me or I am starting with early-onset Alzheimer’s, except it probably isn’t that early any more.
I felt considerably restored after that, and was guiltily determined not to waste any more of the day. I abandoned the painting, and rushed about bringing washing in and bathing the dogs before work.
The dogs needed bathing before we go away next week. It is bad enough that they hum in a normal house, but it quickly becomes not at all lovely in the camper van, where you can smell them even if they are under the bed with a blanket over them. They were very forlorn about this, but I don’t care, because the improvement is immeasurable, and they are soft and fluffy and appealing once more.
I don’t suppose it will even last beyond tomorrow morning’s mud-wrestle around the park.
In the end I dashed off to work, where there were no other taxi drivers, and no customers to disturb me, and so I had a joyfully contented hour with a cup of peppery chai and a book of Terry Pratchett’s essays.
I like Terry Pratchett’s writing very much, although regrettably he died before the world acquired its current conviction that it is shamefully anti-social to breathe in the same room as anybody else. There is nothing nicer than reading opinions with which you agree entirely, and after a while I developed a warm blanket of contentment in the knowledge that the universe is probably the way I think it is after all.
There weren’t any customers all night, apart from a few gloomy bar staff, but it is hardly the peak of the holiday season, and so I don’t at all mind.
In any case, in a few more days we will be away.
Have another picture of Roger Poopy and Pepper after a hard morning’s mud-wrestling.
