I have been spectating.
I have done almost nothing else today, which has been entirely idle, although, I confess, something of a relief.
We are at my parents’ house where I am loafing about. Lucy has been frantically and nervously preparing for her interview with the police in the morning, Mark and Oliver have been ambling around doing useful things, and I have been sitting on the sofa waving my large purple digit at everybody and declaring myself unfit to be of any assistance to anyone.
This has been pleasant, although probably not a good thing really, because it is difficult to ignore a persistent throbbing pain whilst one is not doing anything else much. If I am trying to accomplish two dozen other things, all with a time limit, then sometimes it can fade into the background. It is probably unwise to spend a day endlessly gazing at it and anxiously speculating about exactly how it will feel when the nail bursts off.
Oliver offered to squeeze it off but I have declined.
It has been very pleasant despite this, we are all four in the camper van, complete with the livestock, which is a little squished, but entertaining all the same. The cats like the camper van, which makes a magnificent night-time cat gymnasium. You can spend the earliest daylight hours vaulting from the upper bunks on to somebody’s sore toe, which gives you an added bounce to reach the sink, from which you can reach the table at the far end, before diving back on to the sore toe to be flung up to the bunks again.
We were all woken up very early this morning when one of them had a particularly pungent visit to the litter tray, so powerful that it worked better than any alarm. It is to be hoped they can repeat the performance tomorrow, because Lucy’s interview is very early in the morning, and it would be truly terrible to oversleep.
She is being interviewed for a job in the police force, not because she has committed any crime. I am sure I do not need to explain this, but in case I have any new readers, perhaps I should. She is going to go for an interview with Oldham CID, to see if she might be a good detective, solving crimes and unravelling mysteries of rascally deeds in Oldham.
I am sure she will be a very good detective. She can look things up on Google far faster than I can.
She has been preparing for it all day. She has talked to a retired detective and also a mortgage advisor, because if she comes to live up here she will need to purchase a house. He said that probably she is sufficiently responsible to do this, which is ace, it took me years to get to that stage and I am not sure I am truly there even now.
Mark and Oliver went off to put a gate on one of the fields, and I loafed about with my book and a cup of coffee. We reconvened occasionally during the day, and eventually we all went down to a pub in the village for dinner. Lucy told policing stories and made us all laugh, and I drank more than was good for me. This was reprehensible but left me feeling magnificently numb, most especially my toe, which I thought made it worth any hangover that might result.
We buzzed off to bed early, because Lucy wanted to sit in bed worrying about her interview, and the rest of us wanted to get an early night before the alarm went off in the middle of it.
We are all very excited about it, imagine having a detective in the family.
We can buy her a violin and some drugs for Christmas.
