Goodness, it has been an exciting day.
I have cleaned out the camper van and emptied the loo, it’s all happening here.
This might sound dull, but it is always good to feel the camper van restored to its state of pristine ready-to-use happiness, and my only regret was that we are not at all ready to use it. We have got several days at work to be done first.
Mark has been at work today, in fact. I was not, but did not exactly shirk, despite almost overwhelming temptation. The sun was shining, and I would have liked very much to amble across to the Library Gardens and read a book underneath the trees.
Instead, when I had cleaned the camper van I cleaned my taxi as well, because it is always nicer to go to work in a clean taxi.
The insides of the windows were horrid, encrusted with black dust. They looked as though I had been having bonfires on the back seat, which I hadn’t, although I did have a customer once who was set on fire by another customer. I chucked them both out to put the fire out by themselves on the pavement. I made it very clear that it was not a sequence of events that I wished to accommodate in my taxi, and that I had considerably less interest in their personal health and safety than I had in my own, and indeed that of my taxi..
Anyway, I was feeling very pleased with myself by the time I had finished, and I had just made a celebratory cup of tea when the telephone rang. It was Lucy, in a state of great excitement, because a senior policeman had called her to discuss a transfer to CID.
We will not go into any details here, but Lucy is having some career adventures at present, and might well finish up having a shiny new job. I am very impressed indeed with this, she might become the sort of policeman you see on the television, being dour and unsmiling, and despite considerable over indulgence in alcohol, always running after villains and jumping over walls and driving too fast in an unmarked police car.
She is not this sort of policeman at the moment. At the moment she is the sort of policeman who goes round to people’s houses to take reports about the upsetting text messages that they have just been sent by their ex-partner. She says people grumble about this sort of thing quite a lot, but mostly she can’t do anything at all about it because it is not actually a crime yet to argue in text messages about who doesn’t get custody of the children.
She told me all of this from Number One Daughter’s house, because this week it is Lucy’s turn to have custody of their dog, as Number One Daughter is in a fitness competition in France. She rang today as well, in paroxysms of anxiety about an agonisingly narrow squeak to get on the aeroplane. She made it in the end with four whole minutes to spare, so I don’t know what all the fuss was about.
In fact it has been a day for talking to me children. I have spoken to Number Two Daughter, who wants me to post her some things, so I have been hunting around for them in the loft. Really the loft is a horrid place, full of dust and cobwebs. I felt itchy after the first twenty seconds, and so despite the huge temptation to dig around amongst the piles of old books, and Christmas decorations, and my secret collection of boxed china, I came down as quickly as I could.
There were some mugs and some photograph albums, in which we all look absurdly young. Oliver is still a toddler in most of the pictures, glaring at the camera in great indignation. It looks as though we have had some nice times, though, no wonder we are all so worn out these days.
I have not spoken to Oliver, but to his girlfriend’s mother. Oliver is going to their house to stay instead of coming home at the end of term, and she wanted to make sure I actually knew about it, which of course I did.
We are a little sorry not to be going up to school, because we will miss the beach, but these things happen, we will not be going very many more times anyway now. He is almost grown, and will be taking his own place in the exciting adventures of promotions and competitions and dog-related adventures.
The last little chick will have gone and probably we will not go up to the north of Scotland any more.
I am not in a rush for that.
