I have sobered up.
In fact I have sobered up fairly seriously, having been plagued with peculiar wine-induced dreams in the middle of the night. I looked this up on the mighty internet this morning, and have been nagged with cyber-warnings about binge drinking ever since.
There was nothing useful about being trapped in a horrible white-painted house with scarlet curtains and a murderer whilst Mark sailed off on to the high seas with my car keys in his pocket, which was how I occupied the hours between about three and six. I woke up gulping and shuddering and feeling very glad to be in my pink-and-green circus tent bedroom after all.
I have no idea why my brain might suddenly decide to torment me with such rubbish. Mark said it is my Inner Anxiety coming out, but I don’t have any Inner Anxiety. What anxiety I do have is entirely on the outside and I expect that occasionally the neighbours can hear me shouting about it.
We have, however, had a piece of good news today, or perhaps it is bad news, depending on how we think about it. Mark’s next trip offshore has been delayed by a week, and so he has got another week at home. This is brilliant news because his car needs an MOT, and rubbish news because obviously we have almost completely spent all of our money. There is an Autoparts bill looming in our future, and we were rather hoping that we might be able to start on the camper van repairs in the next couple of weeks.
We have been laying plans for this. At the moment they are ideas rather than plans, but they are exciting to think about all the same. We have worked out that the camper van has done over a hundred thousand miles since last we pulled it apart and rebuilt it, and so we are not surprised by its poor exhausted state any more. It is quite deservedly clapped out.
We have been out today, because Mark needed to put some tyres on his car, and we wanted to explore some potential workshop sites, and in any case I wanted to talk to that lady who does the tyre fitting, because of having feminine solidarity in a world full of blokes. She is my friend.
Taxi driving is not quite as rufty-tufty as fitting tyres but it is a lot more exciting, especially by about three o’clock in the morning when everybody is wearing white crusty bits around their nostrils, and hence we are friends.
We occupied the entire journey to the tyre garage saying things like If we moved the bed to the back and put the bathroom on the other side then we could move the water tank and perhaps have the kitchen behind the cab Yes but what about the wardrobe Well maybe it doesn’t need to be quite so big and in any case the heater keeps setting things on fire Yes that’s a nuisance we ought to do something about that it has scorched my favourite boots Let’s try and do something about that then Yes that’s a good idea we could turn the bathroom around.
And so on.
We have not got any further yet but it is Under Contemplation.
I am very excited.
We are having another night off tonight. Our next door neighbour has offered to cook dinner for us. They are going to bring it through the back yard and eat it in our house because he said that their house is a bit small, which it isn’t really because of being exactly the same size as ours.
Anyway, it will be splendid to have yet another dinner cooked by somebody else, although we are resolved that we will be gentle about alcohol consumption. I was not exactly unwell this morning, but I was certainly a bit delicate. I could not have run a marathon or entered Mastermind, not that I would have done either of those things even after a month of sobriety in a health club.
It is going to be a nice evening.
Certainly it will be nicer than work.
I am practically unemployed at the moment, that is the third night off in a fortnight.
It is being very splendid indeed.
