Goodness me, it is an exciting day.
Even as I write these very words, the two Mrs. Number Two Daughters are running in the Chicago Marathon. This is a genetic imperative, it seems. Number One Daughter ran in the Edinburgh Marathon some years ago. I imagine Lucy and Oliver will be next. I want you all to know here and now that I have got magnificently athletic children, how very proud I am. Probably it is genetic. I would have been running marathons as well if I hadn’t been so busy.
I am following their progress through an App on my phone. You download a thing from something called an App Store, feed in their names, and it tells you how fast they are running. I tried to watch it all on You Tube but it was very boring, they were not showing the Number Two Daughters at all, just some dull black chap, and wittering on about a world record. They kept saying that he was on fire, which was quite clearly not true, even from the blurry photographs on You Tube. In any case, these kept being obscured by some writing explaining that you needed to click a link to see properly. I couldn’t find the link and after a while lost interest in trying. I hope his mother was appreciating all the attention he was getting, because I expect all the other fifty thousand mothers will have been just as bored as I was.
Anyway, they are doing very well, according to the App. I keep sending them some messages which the race puts on a board so that runners can see them, although I don’t suppose they are reading them. I expect they are too busy running and puffing to look up. I keep saying things like Hurry Up There Is A Black Chap Beating You, which I am sure will inspire them to greater things.
Anyway, I have had a busy day trying to watch them on You Tube and getting our lives organised. I have been trying to do something about all of our clothes in the smelly loft. It is not very middle class to have clothes that smell of a mouldy attic, because it shows that you only need to wear them once a year, and the rest of the time you are dressed like a degenerate tramp. It would be very sad if even my best sartorial efforts portrayed this message, and so I have been trying to correct the problem.
Obviously the best way to correct the problem would be to clean out and de-mould the loft, but that might be a job for another day. In the meantime I need to do something short term.
I have brought all of our middle-class coats down the stairs and emptied them out of their bags. I sprayed the bags with a solution of washing soda and hung them in the yard to dry. Then I hung the coats in the window to flap gently in the breeze and probably acquire the slightly preferable odour of firewood and rat poo from the back yard. Once they are more acceptably perfumed, we are going to put the whole lot in some special anti-smell bags that we have bought from Lakeland, which is handily just next door to Booths, what a fortunate siting.
Incidentally the cats seem to be hunting the rats in the back alley with great enthusiasm. I am pleased about this. It will save a fortune on cat food if they get good at it. They woke us up this morning when they decided we had been asleep for long enough. We did not agree, but it is difficult to stay asleep when somebody is purring in your ear like a NASA space launch, and patting your nose with a furry foot, so we got up.
This was when we went to Lakeland, once we were dressed, obviously, and wandered around in a bemused kind of way because it seemed suddenly to be Christmas, which we had not been expecting. There were loads of things that we would have liked to buy so that we could feel as if it was Christmas as well. I was very impressed with a wind-up musical biscuit tin that spun around in circles but it cost £8.99 and we could not tell if it had biscuits in it already.
Maybe at Christmas.
LATER NOTE: Both of the Number Two Daughters have finished. I am very impressed indeed.
Hurrah for them.
