Mark is home.
I am having to try quite hard to be pleased about this because so far the rewards of patient wifehood have been a pile of dirty laundry and some considerable amounts of cooking.
He came back yesterday evening, and since it was Saturday night, came out to drive a taxi for the leftover bit of night. When we came home he went straight to bed, where he stayed until almost four o’clock this afternoon.
He says this was because he has been doing night shifts and did not get any sleep on his last night on the oil rig. I know that the lack-of-sleep happened at least partly because he was watching television in the mess room with the others instead of finding a quiet corner in which to indulge in forty winks, because their last shift finished at midnight.
Hence I have not felt exactly overjoyed, and have occupied most of today getting dinners ready and pegging oil-rig flavoured socks on the washing line.
Oliver did not need any dinner because he is not working tonight and is going to make himself some concoction incorporating a large number of eggs, in order to facilitate his muscle-building activities.
He has been at work all day. He came home and dashed out to clean his car, after which he is planning to go to the gym.
I am very impressed. I should have cleaned my own car today, because it is Sunday, but the day ran out and I didn’t.
Of course I did not exactly leap out of bed with the lark. This would not have been practicable, since the larks had already started trilling before I actually made it into bed in the first place, after a long Saturday night filled with intoxicated revellers.
I do not like weekends at all. Occasionally I see posts on Facebook where the writer is excitedly celebrating Friday afternoon, because of weekend glories ahead, and whilst I understand the theory, the actual sentiment is something of a mystery. August weekends in the Lake District are filled with overcrowded roads, bad-tempered police, and noisily drunk people. They are noticeably drained of things like sufficient sleep and uninterrupted dinners.
Hence I have not been in the brightest of sunny moods today, and stumped around tidying things and trying to reorganise my life after a weekend of attempting to keep my customer-service manner at least somewhere beneath outright offensiveness.
I made dinners and watered the conservatory. The conservatory plants, most noticeably the massive and uncontrollable Swiss Cheese plants, are having their summer growth-spurt, and I have been sighing over the realisation that they have grown so determinedly that they are pushing against the windows and their leaves are beginning to yellow. They have grown half a dozen new fruits, which are going to turn into the odd, massive flowers any day now. Last year’s fruits have not yet ripened to the point of being edible yet, according to the mighty Internet this might take another five or six months. We do not want to cut the plants back whilst they are fruiting so energetically, and so probably will have to cut a hole in the roof instead.
I had almost finished and was squelching around mopping up when my telephone rang, and it was Number Two Daughter, wanting to know if I had seen the photographs she sent me. I agreed that I had,, and she sighed and asked if I had been able to read it.
Not having the first idea what she was talking about, I said that I couldn’t. This was true. One of the photographs she had sent had been a flat grey landscape, and I had looked at it in puzzlement and concluded that she had inadvertently taken a picture of her tabletop, and accidentally added it to her WhatsApp feed.
Do not ridicule. I do things like that.
I could hear her rolling her eyes even though she is in Canada.
The grey picture, she explained, for which in my elderly-state of short-sightedness I had not gone to hunt for my glasses in order to view it, was a beach, upon which the words Will You Marry Me had been spelled out in pebbles by the currently common-law Mrs Number Two Daughter.
They are going to get married.
I was so surprised I couldn’t think of anything to say, and so said, slightly foolishly, Gosh, that’s nice.
It took me a while before the enormity of what she was telling me began to penetrate, and I began to woffle brainlessly. When and where? I wanted to know, but since the decision was only reached yesterday they have not yet done any planning.
It has cheered me up no end. I am very pleased. I like Mrs. Number Two Daughter very much.
Obviously there is going to be a party.
We will have to start saving up.
