Guilt-Wracked

I think we have got some kind of narcoleptic plague. I have become remarkably, ridiculously sleepy.

Even Oliver went to bed last night and stayed there until four o’clock this afternoon, and he is really not quite the thing. He was coughing and spluttering like somebody who has just inadvertently giggled whilst in the middle of a high-dive.

He can sleep like this because his bed is not next to the front door and so the postman does not wake him up.

The postman knows that we work nights but he was worried that somebody might steal the windscreen wiper motor he was delivering this morning if he did not wake me up.

I am not coughing but woke up to the doorbell feeling far more exhausted and grumpy than anybody has a right to feel after almost eight hours in bed, and have been wallowing in weary self-pity ever since.

This has been considerably mitigated by the thrilling excitement of organising Number One Daughter’s approaching MBE arrangements.

We are going to go to Windsor Castle. Absolutely everybody in our entire family except poor studious Lucy and Oliver is going to go. We are going to stay in a very nice hotel which is just outside the Castle gates, and even better, Mark will have been paid by then and we will have so much money that it won’t matter if we decide to have a second cocktail before dinner. We will walk up the very driveway where the poor Queen was carried to her last resting place, and stand by the very towers beneath which Prince Andrew tried to put out the dreadful fire by himself with a bucket.

Of course he was probably in the Gordonstoun Fire Brigade in his youth. They are quite keen on all that sort of thing.

Just think, William the Conqueror built it. I know this because they told us when Prince Philip’s funeral was on YouTube.

Apart from arranging exciting adventures, and of course, the merciless arrival of Clean Sheets Day, I have not done very much at all. This is because I don’t really count writing my dissertation as doing anything. It really doesn’t feel as though just sitting about writing and thinking things is actually work, actually it seems like the most shockingly idle shirk. The builders have left us some more firewood, and I ought to have been outside sawing it up, and I wasn’t.

I didn’t even do the dusting. I know that I will look at the dust later and make myself miserable with guilt, and it will serve me right. I have ignored it.

I have been shirking because I am off to Cambridge in another couple of weeks, and I have got a pile of things that I have got to read and write before then. I spoke to Mark on the telephone this afternoon, and he said equably that reading and writing a dissertation was more important than dusting, but that is because he is in the middle of the North Sea where somebody else is doing it.

He said that I ought to have a night off work and get some more sleep, but I am not sure if my guilty conscience will tolerate that. It is quite wicked enough to have dust on all of the skirting boards without idling the night away as well, I will have to see how I feel later.

I am going to have a short dog-emptying excursion and then contemplate my future.

I could go and sit on the taxi rank just for a little while, perhaps.

Perhaps I shall go and do that.