We are home.
Of course we arrived home yesterday, but it was Saturday, and hence I did not write in these pages, but dashed off to work to restore our holiday-flagging finances.
We did not dash straight out to work. Actually we arrived home, dumped everything we owned into a sprawling heap in front of the washing machine, and collapsed into bed. I set an alarm to wake us up before we ought to go to work, but it failed to go off, and instead we were woken up, by great good fortune at almost exactly the right moment, by Roger Poopy whimpering anxiously at the end of our bed.
He was not whimpering out of concern for our poor timekeeping, but because there were fireworks going off outside.
Jack’s dad Rod had very kindly looked after the dogs whilst we were roister-roistering around Manchester, and when we got back he reported that Roger had been very afraid of fireworks. He had been trembling and crying, he explained, and was very upset indeed.
Now we discovered the truth of this.
Since Roger Poopy is our dog and we do not need to be nice to him, we solved the problem by telling him to shut up and stop being such a weed, and then tripping over him where he was shivering mournfully in the dark at the side of our bed.
He carried on being frightened for about another ten minutes, but eventually realised that our capacity for sympathy when we are late for work is fairly close to none whatsoever, and eventually thumped down on his cushion in front of the fire, sighing heavily and feeling misunderstood. He whimpered occasionally for a bit longer, whilst we said For Goodness’ Sake, Roger, and then gave up and went to sleep. After a little while he trotted off for a last empty with Mark in the Library Gardens without demur, although Mark said that he had kept a very close eye open all the way around for anything that might unexpectedly go Bang.
After that, of course, it was Saturday night at work, which meant that we did not rise early this morning.
We barely rose early this afternoon, actually.
When we did eventually stir, we sat in bed for ages, drinking coffee and feeling pleased to be at home with nothing exciting happening to us, except of course there is something exciting happening, because next week we are off to collect the new camper van.
We will be catching the train to Huntingdon Station on Tuesday.
We were mildly nonplussed to discover that we are not the only people thinking about Huntingdon Station at the moment, all those poor people, how awful. I do not suppose that there is likely to be a repeat disaster, and so of course we are not especially anxious about it, although all of the drone photographs in the Daily Telegraph have been very handy for us to work out how far we are likely to have to walk to find the taxi rank when we get there.
No matter how terrible the cloud, there is always a small silver lining for somebody.
With this in mind, we decided that we would spend today taking the old camper van apart.
The man at the scrapyard said that he did not want it, and so we have started demolishing it.
There is not very much left anyway, because we have already taken out almost all of the inside.
There was not much of the day left either by the time we finally got ourselves organised and went across there. We managed to take the loo out and remember the pile of useful change we had left in the ashtray at the front, but that was the extent of our success before the day disappeared and we had to start heading off home for work.
When we looked at it, with the new eyes of people who have just purchased an exciting and colossal new truck, we knew that it could never have been big enough to do everything we had wanted, and also that it really is a completely collapsed heap of black mould, splinters and rust.
Mark is going to go back to it tomorrow and start cutting it up.
Poor camper van, its days are done.
We might still set fire to it and consider some fireworks of our own.
It would be fitting for it to go out with a bang.
