Uncaring

I have been restoring order, and it is absolutely blissful.

I have put clean sheets on the beds and filled, and refilled, and refilled, the washing machine. I have hoovered the children’s bedrooms and cleaned their bathrooms. Mark brought the camper van round to the house so we could clean it out, then he took it to the garage and washed the inch-thick layer of Scottish salt off the outside. There was so much encrusted salt that we could no longer see out of the windows. It is very useful stuff on slippery roads, but not a perfect addition to an ancient camper van. It is already beginning to dissolve in quite a few places, and I am afraid that we are going to have to do some more patchwork to it this year.

I have approached the whole day in a spirit of ecstatic light-headedness, because it is all over, and the relief is almost intoxicating. We have managed all of the Christmas challenges, a bit like being a celebrity confronted by a nest of tarantulas in an Australian film studio. We have managed a loft rebuild and some Advent calendars, some Christmas cards and chocolates and an MOT. We have funded a theatre visit, a driving test and an Indian dinner. We have cleared Mark’s field and passed our medical examinations and argued with the council and completed university assignments. We have, I think, managed to discharge all of our responsibilities without public disgrace. Now, at the last of it, we have managed to coax the camper van to Scotland and back again without freezing to death. Oliver is once again in receipt of an education, and you might not be astounded to hear that we are on the taxi rank.

We are on our own. There are neither other taxis nor customers. It is very quiet, because it is a Wednesday night in January, and nobody has turned up for a raucous holiday in the English equivalent of the Maldives. I do not care about this in the least. I am perfectly happy. I am not trying to earn vast sums of money for anything other than the insurance bill on the credit card, and so life is a positive breeze. We are without a single care in the whole world.

Obviously we aren’t, but after all of the fuss of Christmas it feels like it. I do not have to obsess about my mince pie deficiencies nor worry about providing bed linens for newly-enlarged sleeping spaces. I do not need to extricate cats from Christmas trees nor endlessly sweep up the chocolate wrappers left over from villainous canine raiders. The world has become tranquil.

We are not entirely alone, because Lucy is home, although she is congenial company. Every now and again she tells us stories from her detecting adventures which make us laugh, I am quite sure Sherlock Holmes never had quite so many troubling weirdos on his patch, no wonder they need to be in teams of six.

Also a nice thing happened today, two nice things, actually. Once was a box of new paints mysteriously arriving on the doorstep, which turned out to be a thank-you present from Oliver’s girlfriend’s mother. I was very pleased indeed with this. I am still in the post-Christmas state of exhaustion where I never want to paint anything ever again, but I am perfectly well aware that this will wear off in a week or two, and I will start looking at the world and pondering ways of cheering it up a bit. The inevitable consequence of this is that something gets some leaves painted on it, or even a flower if I am feeling creative. Also I had better start on next year’s Advent calendars in a week or two, I don’t want to finish up rushing next November.

The other nice thing was an invitation from an old friend to join them for dinner at Gilpin Spice in the summer. This was exciting both because I have not seen my friend for years and years, and am hugely looking forward to an evening of alcohol and reminiscences, but also because we have often said that we would love to eat at Gilpin Spice one day, but never have. This is because it is very, very expensively middle-class, a chap in a waistcoat comes out to greet you when you get out of the taxi and makes convincingly pleased-to-see-you-madam noises. Also none of the staff, well not that I know about at the moment anyway, are chronic drunkards or rascals, and also because the food is supposed to be excellent.

We will be going to eat there in June.

I have marked it on the calendar.

Not only have we managed tidily to sign off our past, we also have a future.