Funding fuel

Being at work during the day is the most magnificent shirk possible.

Instead of rushing around hoovering and cooking things I have got my feet up with a book, a cup of tea and I am sitting here very peacefully next to the lake.

I do not need to worry about writing assignments or emptying dogs or what we need from Sainsbury’s, because all of those things are for a person who is at home during the day. I am not that person. I am at work and cannot possibly be expected to do anything else at all.

Hence I am sitting here among the daffodils and breathing in the gentle breeze that is drifting across the lake. The sun is shining and nobody seems to want a taxi, and so my life is pretty close to being perfect.

How jolly glad I am that I failed to listen at school. I might have had to be a merchant banker or a lawyer, in which case I would probably have had a stress-related illness by now.

Talking of which, there has still been no word from Cambridge about my desirability or otherwise as a Master’s’s degree student. I do wish they would make their minds up.

I do not care today, I am not going to spoil the sunshine and a very nice cup of tea with worries.

Just a minute.

Just when I thought life could become no better I have discovered half a bar of almond chocolate in the door pocket.

Truly I am having a happy day.

Of course I have not been sitting here all day. In fact I have spent most of the day belting around trying to get all the hoovering and so on done before I came out here.

We are going off to Scotland tonight, and so there has been lots of preparation.

On the whole I thought that probably the most useful preparation I could do would be to earn a bit of extra cash for diesel, given the current political situation, the invading Russians and the extortionate cost of everything that comes out of a petrol pump.

Fuel for my taxi is now almost as expensive as printer ink. That is a sobering thought.

Of course fuel for the camper van is also hideously expensive, and the round trip to Oliver’s school is just a little bit longer than seven hundred miles.

This is why I am sitting here. It is not merely an outburst of idleness.

I have done everything else, apart from the things I have forgotten. I have washed all of our clothes and packed them in the camper van. I have hoovered and tidied and swept. I have watered the conservatory and packed our dinners.

When Mark comes home we will have showers and depart.

LATER NOTE: Mark is now home. I have had my shower and he is having his. We are About To Depart.

Regrettably the afternoon at work stayed peaceful, so peaceful in fact, that I will not be contributing my small taxi-driver’s mite towards the fuel costs. I did not even make back the cost of my cup of tea. Obviously tea has a cost, and I would not have drunk it if I had stayed at home. I would have carried on, virtuously rushing about.

Not to worry, onwards and upwards.

I have just come up with a small difficulty in that I have come to wear, for the very first time, one of the new jerseys I bought a couple of weeks ago, and which I have been saving for this very occasion.

I have discovered that it has a picture of a spider on it.

It is a very small spider, but a spider nevertheless, and I keep noticing it, with horrid starts of surprise.

I am not entirely sure what to do about it.

It is a red spider, on a black jersey, and so I have coloured it in with a black permanent marker, which seems to have turned my fingers black but not the spider.

I can’t even give this jersey to Mark because then I would have to look at the spider even more often.

It is dark tonight, and so perhaps I won’t notice it too much, although I shall know that it is there, which will not be nice. .

Tomorrow I shall sew a patch over it. It won’t still be there under the patch. It will vanish out of existence. If I can’t see it then it will no longer exist.

Why on earth would anybody invent jerseys with pictures of spiders on? It is a truly mental world sometimes.

I am going to go away and look for something to make a patch.

PS It gets worse.

I have just noticed that the stupid thing says Spider on the back, but it is spelt wrong.

Unbelievable.