Since Mark is not offshore yet he has taken Oliver’s car for an MOT today, which it failed.
It was not due for an MOT but we made a joint decision that in the middle of term time is not a good time for a vehicle suddenly to need urgent repairs, and so we thought we would create a new MOT timeline in the middle of the school holidays.
It has got a broken spring and a couple of weary tyres, which does not surprise me, they have done an awful lot of miles this year. Mark says the broken spring is a nuisance, but they tootled off to the scrap yard and replaced the tyres straight away, what a middle-class outfit we are.
I was not exactly sorry to have them both out from under my feet, and once I had finished all of the usual daily faffing about, by which I mean laundry and general tidying up, I went off to get on with writing my funeral oration. I have come to bury Caesar, not to rabbit on about him.
I have had lots of comical ideas for it, but the rest of the family has firmly declined all of them, I am crossing Funeral Speech Writer off my list of things I want to do when I grow up. I do not think it is my creative niche.
In the end I gave up for the day, and took my books back to the library. I had taken out a truly ghastly tome about the perennial practice of beheading people. This was both interesting and gruesome, so gruesome that I didn’t read past the first couple of chapters, but I was captivated by the idea that cutting somebody’s head off is basically a dramatic act performed for the benefit of spectators, and the poor victim is merely one participant in an especially horrid sort of drama. Apparently done properly it is one of the most painless ways to die, although how anybody has discovered that I can’t imagine. We stopped doing it because it was messy, not because it was inhuman, and involved too much clearing up.
I can’t tell you much more because of having decided that my interest ended there. Actually it ended with an unexpected photograph, the sort that comes in matt print like the pages, not the glossy sort that you flick to ages before you actually get to that part of the book. Anyway, I hadn’t seen it coming, and it was a photograph of some poor Frenchman about to be guillotined, less than a hundred years ago, so I thought perhaps I wouldn’t read any more.
I handed it back to the library and got out some Stephen King instead. Stephen King is my new literary hero. He has written an unimaginable number of books, all gripping, and he has managed in between to have a spectacularly dodgy personal life. I have no idea how he does it. I find it difficult to manage to get round to writing anything at all when it is clean sheets day, never mind writing sixty books in between lots of rascally life adventures. I am going to have to get my finger out. Maybe when I have finished writing funeral orations.
I have brought one to work with me. I am on the taxi rank now, and it is just starting to rain. We are expecting a very lot of rain tonight, along with high winds, so I am having a quiet worry about Lucy, who is camping in Silloth, miles to the north. She has assured me that she and Caitlin have managed to fix the leak in their tent and will be perfectly dry, but I would not be in the least astonished to discover her in her bedroom here by morning.
I have changed her sheets in readiness, just in case.
