Mark is home.
I have spent the entire day dashing about getting everything done.
I have sawn up some more firewood, not because it was needed, but because there was a bit of empty space in the house where I have been shoving wood into the ever-hungry fire, and I wanted to clear a space so that Mark would be able to get into the workshop when he got home.
He knew this before he even got off the station, not because I told him, but because he is sufficiently observant to have realised that the small scruffy person hastening along the platform to meet him had been covered in a light coating of sawdust.
He does not usually go to work on the train, but we had been expecting to be in Manchester tonight, and he was going to fly back. This did not happen because the oil industry is as unreliable as a teenager whose parents have implored him to be home early, but who has found that there are several irresistible pretty girls and an unexpected bottle of vodka at the school disco. The dates were changed, along with the theatre tickets and the hotel booking, greatly to my irritation, and a flight was booked. Then the dates were changed again, and the company paid, without much in the way of apology, for a compensatory train ticket, although not, I noted, for the extra cost of changing the hotel and theatre tickets, the rotters, and Mark finally chugged into Oxenholme Station at six o’clock this evening.
I had rushed at absolutely everything in order to get there on time to meet him. I had paid the weekend’s takings into the Post Office and trailed up to Booths, where I purchased the sort of food that I hoped he would find acceptable after three weeks of hot dinners and puddings on the oil rig. Mark is not interested in my current dietary fad which consists largely of yoghurt, mackerel and peanut butter, both separately and combined. I like this, but knew that looks of polite incomprehension would be the result of serving it to Mark, and so today I restocked the fridge.
Oliver does not eat yoghurt, mackerel and peanut butter either. He has his girlfriend staying at the moment. She is very lovely but tries so hard not to be any trouble that I am constantly forgetting she is there, and have to remind myself, guiltily, that she ought to be fed occasionally. I resolved this difficulty today by buying half a dozen pizzas and telling her to put one in the oven whenever she is hungry.
Oliver should be doing that for her but he is also at work, and has left his girlfriend exhaustedly sleeping off the rigours of a half-term looking after toddlers.
I pegged the sheets on the line, regrettably before I sawed up the firewood, and so had to spend some time brushing sawdust off them afterwards.
After that there was sawdust everywhere again, and the yard and the floors had to be swept. Then there was the dusting and hoovering, which comes with the clean sheets, and dinners to be prepared, and eventually I hurried out to collect Mark, arriving with three minutes to spare, which I considered to be a perfect taxi-driver achievement.
He volunteered to take my taxi out to work to see if he could work out what the problem was, but it broke down on his first job, so he took it home again, leaving me with his taxi. He has been doing nights, and had been awake for a very long time, with the inevitable result that after a little while he gave up on taxi-breakdown pondering, and retired between the clean sheets.
I am out in the dark on the taxi rank. I have got another hour to go. It is very quiet, which I don’t mind in the least, because it is very nice to be sitting here undisturbed. It has been a very busy day.
I am going to spend the last hour of it reading my book.
