So, this week it would appear that Wednesday is the new Friday.
We are on the taxi rank, and the world is bopping excitedly around us. The bistro across the road is playing New Romantic music from the nineteen eighties, the sun is shining, and Oliver has been told to present himself at work tidily clad in black, in order to assist with the expected rush by waiting at tables as well as just washing pots.
This caused something of a problem, as he did not have any clothes at all that were either tidy or black, having left the entire contents of his respectable wardrobe at school. He has gone wearing the only T-shirt we could find that did not have rude words inscribed upon it, and a pair of trousers that are so ridiculously large they are being held up with a belt.
He has got a tidy new haircut, which was the major gesture towards respectability that we could manage to achieve, courtesy of the Turkish barber in the village. I suppose it might mitigate the effect of the trousers a bit.
In fact he very nearly did not go to work at all. Our neighbours rang us at lunchtime to say that they had some spare tickets for Sleeping Beauty at the Palace in Manchester tonight, and would we like them.
Obviously we would have liked them, with our whole souls.
Get thee behind me.
We could not do it. We knew we could not do it. We could not even spare the money for fuel, and we are trying so hard to become solvent again at the moment. We had a glorious ten minutes imagining the swirling music and the dancing, and the enchantment of the lighting, and wondered wistfully if the theatre would try and find some fresh excuse to use the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang hydraulic lift. Then we regretfully turned our faces to the dark road before us, and declined.
I can hardly tell you how much we would have liked to have abandoned all responsibility. We could so easily have jumped in the camper van, chugged down the motorway, and gone to the theatre and afterwards to Blackpool.
Being a grown up is so hard sometimes.
Instead Mark took the dogs to the farm, and then trailed reluctantly off to Ambleside to have his sore tooth pulled out.
This was not at all nice and we will draw a veil over such an unhappy event. Suffice to say that he was ridiculously brave, and is still being brave now, and eating cheese and onion pie with hardly any complaint at all.
I stayed at home and readied ourselves for the onslaught of activity that we are hoping the weekend might bring. I cleaned and polished and tidied so that we would feel as though we were living in a smart hotel, it is a lot easier to feel like this when Mark and the dogs are out.
After that I made a black currant chocolate cake so that we might feel as though we were living in a good restaurant, and cooked a pie and some sausages. You can eat sausages even in good restaurants, although they do not usually come from Asda. These have had to come from Asda because the butcher in Windermere is always closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, and has taken the opportunity to have a very long holiday indeed. It will be a whole week before we can purchase sausages again, and it is a jolly good thing I have made my own pies.
All in all I have prepared ourselves for the weekend of activity that looms ahead. I expect the Queen has been doing the same. She has got a lot of hard partying over the next few days, and I should think she has been making sure that the loo is clean and the dressing table is thoroughly dusted.
I don’t suppose she cares as much about the dressing table now that Prince Philip has died. It won’t keep getting cluttered up with handfuls of screws and zip ties and old handkerchiefs that he has taken out of his pockets before he put his trousers in the wash. It will just be her hairbrush, and ear rings, perhaps the handkerchief out of her own pocket, and probably a handful of dog poo bags.
I hope she has a lovely party.
