We are having a duvet day.
We crawled sleepily into the daylight for the school runs this morning, but once we were home and the children fed and watered we retreated immediately back again.
It was like being like hibernating bears in a cave at the side of Piccadilly: we dozed fitfully through postmen and delivery men, and the dogs barking at people walking past, and people on the telephone and Lucy and Oliver doing their Online Fitness Workout on FaceTime with Lucy’s other friends from school. This seemed to include a lot of shrieking and giggling and shouting at Oliver for not doing proper press ups, and once or twice the ceiling of our room, which is the floor of theirs, seemed to be in some peril.
In the end somebody banged on the back door and we gave up. It wasn’t somebody coming to complain about the racket, though, it was Elspeth, who wanted to talk about buying minibuses, so we stopped trying to sleep and got up.
I didn’t have a single helpful thing to say about minibuses, we have had some once and I think we probably still have a licence to run a bus company if we felt like it, which I don’t, at all. I listened patiently and racked my brains for something helpful and encouraging to say, but couldn’t and had to settle for nodding sagely, with an air of wisdom as one who has Been There And Done It, which is usually a good substitute for knowing what I am talking about.
After she had gone my task of the day was supposed to be baking biscuits, but as those days go when you haven’t had enough sleep, somehow it just didn’t organise itself, and I seemed to get stuck on washing up and emptying rubbish bins for ages. Mark took Oliver and the dogs off to the farm to shoot at tin cans and do some work in the barn, and I collected an endless pile of cups and plates and spoons and more cups from all over the house and piled them up in a teetering heap next to the sink, and then got distracted by something else and forgot I had left them there.
When eventually I got back to them it just seemed as if I washed and washed and the pile never got any smaller. It took ages: and then suddenly it was gone, and the kitchen was tidy and fresh again, and I could bake.
I made some peanut biscuits with chocolate, and some chicken curry with honey yoghurt and coconut and bananas and an onion which I miraculously found rolling down the alley at the back of the house. I was very pleased about this, because it was perfectly all right, although Lucy rolled her eyes and said I was embarrassing.
By the time Mark and Oliver got home having shot lots of cardboard snipers the sleepiness had caught up with me, and we decided that we would not go to work tonight.
Sometimes we do this on Tuesday, it is all right not to work on either Tuesday or Wednesday because not many people go out having stag parties or leaving parties or engagement parties on those nights, and our customers tend to be just hotel staff wanting to go home who have never got any money, or lone drunks who have been in the pub because they are unhappy, and on the whole they never have any money either: so if we are going to have a night off those are the times. We had had enough of working for a living, so we collapsed in front of a DVD from LoveFilm called Pompeii.
We thought that the producers must have been on a tight budget, because they had borrowed most of the script from the film we saw the other week called San Andreas, and some more of it from Jurassic World, and they had borrowed the hero from the Night’s Watch in A Game of Thrones.
We knew about the borrowing because every time the crowd of extras stampeded they always left a little girl behind for the hero to rush back and rescue at great personal peril from the dinosaurs or the collapsing building or the tidal wave. I never realised how dangerous it is to be a little girl, fortunately nobody ever had to dash back and rescue me from anything, so I must have been very lucky. However it is handy to know when you have got children that ever you are caught up in a moment of great calamity that somebody, probably an American hero, will rush the wrong way through the crowds to scoop them up and bear them nobly to safety. I could have saved myself a great deal of anxiety if I had known that earlier.
We have finished the film and the curry, and washed up, and now we are going to empty the dogs and leave the children to educate themselves, and we are going to go to bed, which is one of my favourite places except there are rather a lot of dogs in it at the moment.
Back to the duvet.
