We are working all night tonight so we went back to bed after our school runs this morning.
We set the alarm for eleven, and we had every intention of getting up then and getting on with the day, but when it went off actually we didn’t do that at all. We switched it off wickedly, and went back to sleep, so in the end it was lunchtime before we emerged, blinking like kittens, into the sunshine.
Having said that, we felt absolutely brilliant then, bright eyed and happy and not sleepy at all, which doesn’t happen nearly as often as I would like it to, and which was ace. It was a hot, damp sort of day, and when we took the dog to be emptied in the Library Gardens everything smelled wonderful, dense and rich and heavy, so when we got back I optimistically hung the washing outside, but unfortunately it rained then, and we had to bring it all back in again.
We spent the rest of the day getting our lives organised ready for the weekend. Once we start work on Friday afternoons, the whole of the next few days blurs into a sort of confused muddle of different taxi ranks and tourists and collapsing into bed at all the wrong times, and getting up several times a day instead of just once like you might with a real job, and spending any of the day that is left over in yawning and grumbling and drinking coffee, until suddenly it is Monday and we have got money to put into the bank and vitamin deficiency headaches.
This means that if we want to get through it all feeling serene and happy it is a good idea to be well prepared. I made some biscuits and some more mayonnaise, because we had eaten absolutely all of both. Mark couldn’t get on with outside things at first, because it was raining so hard, so he stayed in the kitchen listening kindly to me talking to him for a while, and sharpened all of the scissors, which wasn’t really preparation for work, but which was brilliant, they work really well now and make a nice efficient scissory noise when I open and close them.
Then he went upstairs and ordered some pellets for their guns, because Oliver is coming home next week, and they are going to go up to the farm and practise Oliver’s shooting.
This is an important thing to be able to do if you are a boy, and Oliver’s school holds Fathers And Sons Shooting competitions occasionally which Oliver will be able to enter when he is big enough to lift the gun up properly.
Also it can come in very handy from time to time. When we were younger Mark always won things on fairground shooting stalls, even when the sights were bent. I was quite shallow enough to be very impressed by this, and he has since confessed that he had long found it to be a useful aphrodisiac. Anyway, there will come a time when Oliver will need to be able to show off to girls as well, especially since it doesn’t look as though he is going to get his finger out and get a place at Eton, he is going to need to have some assets that he can flaunt.
It stopped raining then, and Mark fixed the bits of taxi that have worn out over the last couple of weeks, mostly bulbs and fuses and things, and filled up the water and oil and he got his compressor out and blew the tyres up, and polished them and hoovered them out, especially mine which was full of sand after yesterday’s adventures.
I cleaned out our taxi bags and threw away all the horrible old tissues and toothpicks that we had used and inexplicably not thrown away but saved in a nasty bacterial clutter in the corners. I emptied out all the crumbs and stray peanuts into the bin, and wiped the bags out so that they were fresh and nice. Then I made smoked ham and cheese sandwiches on tomato and olive bread rolls with lots of fresh lemony mayonnaise and salad, and packed up fruit and nuts and home made biscuits and a large flask of Earl Grey Tea.
We took the dog for a last walk and felt very pleased and organised and happy with ourselves. We had got clean taxis and a tidy house and nice sandwiches and an empty dog: and a cupboard with biscuits to picnic on during weekend emergencies.
We will still be tired and grumpy by Monday, I expect: but we will have given it our best shot.
