This is going to be a very short entry because I am very weary, and sleep is creeping up on me like a cut-purse at a seventeenth century hanging.
I am at home, in my own bed, and I am so relieved I can hardly say.
We also have some little chicks in the nest, one is Lucy and the other is Oliver’s girlfriend who is a sort of substitute chick, a chick-in-common-law, as it were. She is a nice substitute, every bit as incomprehensible as Oliver but in a different way. Oliver talks about internet games with rules and triumphs that I do not understand at all. His girlfriend talks about animation, and magnificent animators, and I do not understand any of that either, I think perhaps I am just not quite as well-informed as I would like to think I am. All the same, her eyes light up when she tells us things and so I think it does not matter if I don’t know what she is talking about because it is very plain that it is a good thing.
Nobody else’s eyes were lighted up tonight, except when we remembered that there was a full box of wine on the shelf. We were all weary and numb from hours of house-moving and flat-cleaning and trailing heavily between Kettering and the Lake District, with a brief stop in Manchester on the way.
We stopped in Manchester to see my parents, who had kindly collected a chainsaw for Mark, and to collect Oliver’s girlfriend, but we were all so exhausted that we were practically monosyllabic, and I think they were probably relieved to see us depart again.
We slept for twelve hours last night, except Lucy, who slept another hour after we woke up. We did not at all want to get up even then, certainly not when we discovered that one of our four-legged friends, we did not know which, had been sick on the carpet. This was not a fine start to the day, and the next events, the further hauling around of furniture, was not greatly inspiring either. It all ended in a terrified flap when we could not find the flat key, which had been on the table and was now lost. We were just starting to get everything out of the trailer again for a desperate hunt through the boxes when fortunately Lucy discovered it in her pocket, so it ended cheerfully after all.
In the end it was half past nine when we chugged to a halt in the back alley outside the house, where you will not be surprised to hear that it was raining, heavily. The Weather Gods had been uncharacteristically benevolent during our stay in Kettering, and not a single drop of rain fell on us as we staggered around with washing machines and dining tables tucked under our arms, but once we returned to the Lake District, presumably they saw no reason to hold off for any longer, and the heavens were flung open as widely as a patio door in barbecue weather.
We stopped on our way past to look at Lucy’s house, which we were surprised to discover that we thought was perfectly acceptable. It is small, but tidy, and we rather liked the next door neighbour, who came out to see what we were doing, and told us he was an Irish gypsy. Fortunately Lucy does not bring her work home with her, and so I am sure they will get along splendidly.
I am, afraid that really that is my lot. I have run out of words and my eyes are beginning to close, as determinedly as the door on a bus when the driver is in a hurry and you are still fifty yards away.
I will see you tomorrow.
