So here I am again, same old taxi rank, same old customers.
I have come out to try and earn some cash because I am about to start spending a college-related fortune.
I have had the sort of day where you try and get your feet back underneath you, as if life has been the sort of structure that used to be found in the Fun House on wet days in Blackpool and that was extraordinarily entertaining when one was ten. I mean the ones that used to wag about from side to side, and bob up and down for the purpose of shaking children until their candy floss threatened to make a reappearance.
When you came out your legs were quavery from the unaccustomed use, and the hard, flat, stationary ground was peculiarly difficult to navigate.
I feel a bit like that. I have been rattled around and shaken as if I were a James Bond Martini, and although I am perfectly all right at the end of it, I woke up this morning feeling disorientated and unbalanced. I surprised myself when I got out of bed with the discovery that my knees were actually a bit wobbly, as if I had made an unexpectedly speedy descent in a lift, or tried to catch a determinedly disappearing bus, which of course I hadn’t. I have done absolutely no exercise whatsoever for the last two days. I made up for it instantly by putting my dressing gown on and getting back in bed to lean back peacefully against my pillows and contemplate the world for a while.
I would have made myself a morning coffee, and luxuriated in hedonistic idleness, except I was going off over the fell with the dogs and it would have been a terrific nuisance to be wanting a wee all the way round.
I did get up in the end, obviously, and staggered out to investigate the quicksand-mud on the fell, and after that the day was busy. Lots of things are clamouring for my attention now that I have returned to concentrate on the business of living. I have pegged out two loads of funeral-washing. I have even cooked some sausages.
There is also a stack of administration needing to be done now that Oliver is disappearing off to Norland. He needs a new mobile phone contract, and a new GP. He needs a quilt and an ironing board and some new shoes. We are going to get him some properly grown-up middle-class new shoes, because we think his feet have stopped growing now. I jolly well hope they have, at any rate, it would be awful to blow a fortune on smart brown shoes only for him to grow out of them three months later.
There is rent to be paid and college fees to be handed over, tenancy agreements to be signed and countless college documents to be considered and then signed, although mostly Oliver is dealing with those, in between working. He has been working for most of the day.
It is very complicated, this college malarkey.
We had to measure him to register him with his new GP. He is five foot ten inches tall and weighs eight and a half stone.
I was envious.
I stopped doing everything for almost two hours this afternoon when Elspeth dropped in for a cup of tea. I was very thankful, I can tell you, because I had been contemplating sloping off back to bed for half an hour, and I was glad to substitute some guiltless idleness. I was uncomfortably aware that really I should have been sewing name labels into shirts, but they were all up in the loft and it was just too many stairs.
Elspeth had come to tell me about their camping holiday last weekend. She said that she had a nice time, rather to my surprise, because camping in a hurricane would not have been my first choice of leisure activity. She also said that they had been to lots of musical events, and that Lucy was a jolly good dancer.
I knew that because of school concerts, but I was pleased to hear it anyway. It is always nice when your children succeed.
One child succeeded rather spectacularly today. I had just got back from our walk when the doorbell rang and it was a lady with a splendid bunch of flowers. They were from Number Two Daughter and Mrs. Number Two Daughter, telling me that they thought I had done very well with the funeral.
I was very touched and pleased indeed, and arranged them into three vases so that I could have flowers in the office and my bedroom as well as the conservatory. Of course I had not expected anything of the sort, but it was a very kindly thing to have done, and made me feel very much happier.
It is nice to feel appreciated.
