Goodness, it has been a Day.
For a life in which nothing ever happens, there seems to be a very lot of events eventing all about. Suffice to say that our carefully-planned week has come crashing down about our ears, and worst of all, about Lucy’s ears.
Her house has not fallen down. I do not mean that sort of crashing.
The terrible thing that has happened is that Mark has been summoned by his employer and told that he is needed to go offshore for a second time. Tomorrow.
Of course they did not really summon him. They asked him if he would, explaining that they were desperate. It does not look very good to say No Get Lost after a bare three weeks in somebody’s employment. It is all very well to pick and choose what you would like to do, but it is all too likely that if he picked and chose not to do this job, the next one would be a very long time in coming.
Also we did not really earn anything from the first job, it having barely covered his training costs, so I was not exactly sorry.
It is an Uncertain World, and we are adrift on the Sea Of Fortune. In Mark’s case he will be adrift on the sea just north of Aberdeen from tomorrow, on the Blea Holm oil rig.
In poor Lucy’s case she is adrift in a sea of demolished living room.
He has cleared up as much as he could before he had to dash off, but obviously it wasn’t very much.
I have volunteered to go down tomorrow and help in his stead.
I had not been planning to do this, because of Oliver, as of course you know already. He is at home and working his little socks off, and from tomorrow he is going to be walking to and from work as well.
He did not come with me on the dog walk this morning, which was a pity, because to my very great happiness, in the little pond at the bottom of the fell – not the dead-frog tarn, but the other – there were a host of tiny, wriggling tadpoles.
You might recall some weeks ago, probably around early February, I told you we had frog spawn. I have been eyeing it ever since, during all the subsequent inclement weather, and noting gloomily that it had become encrusted with a green slime and layer of mud, and imagining that the frosts had probably killed it all off.
Not so, and this morning, the pond was filled with the happiness of new life. There are lots of them, the edge of the pond was black with them, and I was as pleased as if they had been a bag of fivers. Well, almost as pleased. The Circle Of Life has circulated once more.
When I got back I was feeling so uplifted and contented with the world that since it still wasn’t raining, I cleaned my taxi.
This is the usual sequel to Monday’s housework. It is Tuesday’s Outdoor Housework. I like it no better than any other sort of dusting but it is always very nice to go to work in a clean taxi, and it was horrid. Some peculiar muppet had opened a packet of fruit pastilles and emptied them all over the floor in the back. I have no idea why, or even who did it. My usual customer base of intoxicated kitchen porters and middle-aged fat people with bad legs either would not be expected to purchase fruit pastilles, or would not waste them on taxi floor mats if they had.
Sometimes the world is an unpredictable place.
All of this happened before we were alerted to Mark’s imminent departure, of course, after which point the day became a frantic panic of packing all of his things for going offshore again. It will give you an idea if I tell you I had to go back to the chemist three times for different things I had forgotten, until in the end the chemist said that he was considering limiting the number of times in a day anyone was allowed to flap round his shop asking silly questions, but we now have soap and eye drops and blood pressure drugs and whatever else it was I went for, I can’t remember now.
I saw him briefly when he rushed in for a shower and to collect his newly-stuffed bags, and it is one o’clock in the morning now, and he is just north of Perth. It seems to have taken him a very long time, he has been listening to a story, I think, he generally forgets about putting his foot down when he is thinking about something else.
I do not even know how long he will be gone.
I will worry about that another day.
First I will have to rescue Lucy.
