I am very pleased to announce that when I got home last night, it turned out that Mark had had a surprisingly profitable evening whilst I had been studenting. He had not exactly been busy, just had a couple of fortuitously long-distance jobs and a couple of good tips.
This morning he rushed round to the post office, because the rotters at Barclays have closed their Windermere branch now, and paid off the money that we spent in Asda on the credit card. Then he took the rest round to the flower shop and bought me some flowers.
They are beautiful flowers, red roses and white chrysanthemums, with a few lilies for good measure. He has brought me flowers quite often lately, and told me that he has promised himself that I will always have flowers in the house. I do not believe this, because flowers need replacing every week or so. This means that you have got to be on the ball, and Mark would forget his handkerchief if I did not remind him in the mornings.
All the same, it is a happy thought, and so I have forgiven him for the tyres. I have not exactly apologised, but I have stopped going on and on about it, which is the next best thing.
Hence today we have had a far more contented day, although I regret to say that the weather is still utterly rubbish, so it is a good job that we are not characters in a novel.
I read a truly awful novel which featured this as a plot twist once. The characters discovered halfway through that they were merely invented characters being written by somebody else, and hence had no agency at all, which was why unexpected things kept happening to them. It was supposed to be a philosophical masterpiece, but I thought it was twaddle and did not bother to finish it.
Today we have not been anywhere at all, but occupied ourselves with household tasks. Mark has been sawing up firewood, because next door is having a new kitchen put in, and have kindly donated the old one to the ever hungry stove in our house, currently ravening its way through the woodpile at an alarming rate.
I have been baking biscuits. I have also been trying to telephone Lucy.
Lucy was twenty one yesterday, and had originally intended to come home to celebrate. In the event she decided, wisely, that she would prefer to visit Number One Daughter, who is closer, and who had, in any case, planned a surprise birthday outing to the theatre in London later this week.
Hence we did not catch up with her for this momentous event, apart from a hasty telephone call which happened in between her finishing work and starting on an evening out, during which we ascertained that all her birthday presents had arrived, and she was fine, but busy. We were running up the equivalent of the National Debt in Asda at the time, and so we left her to her celebrations and carried on agonising about the inflated price of soap powder.
In the end we managed to talk to her today, although not until she had got over the whole waking-up-and-groaning-with-regretful-misery sort of feeling that happens on one’s first full day following a significant birthday, or indeed any birthday until the novelty of them has worn off.
Number One Daughter had arranged a small party, with balloons and champagne, which looked so lovely in the photographs that we wished we could have been there. They had bought some balloons in the shape of a 2 and a 1, but the two had popped, so it looked like a birthday party for a surprisingly alcohol-dependent toddler.
Anyway, she is having a very happy week, and sounded full of far more beans than she should have, under the circumstances.
I remember being twenty one. It was a long time ago, but I recall it being a very good age to be, in a brainless sort of way.
I am sure she will enjoy it very much.
