We did school runs again this morning, the picture is the view from mine. Obviously you can all see why I have had enough of it, how tedious to have to drive round there every day, like being Postman Pat.
They are finished now and we are completely without regular employment again, which is scary but a relief. One of the tiresome things about driving a taxi in the Lake District is that although you can do school runs to make money in the week, all of the tourist work is at weekends.
It is very easy to finish up working every single day during term times, and I think in order to assist the local population with resolving this difficulty, the Council ought to make children in Cumbria go to school at weekends and have Wednesdays and Thursdays off instead, which is what I would like to do in my perfect Universe.
There is something terribly dreary about having to be at work on a Thursday, a bit like the way you might feel if you had to drive from Aberdeen to London and had only got as far as Birmingham: you are not where you want to be and it isn’t as if there is anything especially exciting happening. If I was planning a party I would have it on a Thursday, to brighten the day up a bit.
Anyway, fortunately it isn’t Thursday, it is Tuesday and the sun is still shining, which is making me feel quietly joyful. I have washed all of Lucy’s sheets, as a beginning to the sad little process of clearing up in her absence: and Mark and Oliver went off paintballing.
It is Oliver’s last day before school starts tomorrow, and so they went off having a Father Son Day, doing the thing dearest to Oliver’s heart, which is, of course, shooting. This is not because they need to bond especially, because Oliver has always preferred Mark from the moment of birth, and shrieked his head off as a newborn if obliged to be left with me. It is because I have no wish whatsoever to go charging about the fellside carrying an oversized armament and wearing a ridiculous mask, and calling it a Boys’ Day gave me a handy excuse to be excluded.
I stayed at home and hung about the garden in the sunshine for a while, listening to the bees humming, and breathing in the lovely scents of the fennel and the mint and the lavender, and trying not to notice that I was being idle. Eventually I went off up to the loft and packed the last of his things. It turned out that his trousers have somehow become too short over the summer and I had to order some more from Amazon at the last minute. They are supposed to turn up tomorrow and I hope they are fairly early, because I am going to have to sew name tapes on them and take them in at the waist, because he hates the sort which handily have a button and elastic inside, and is too thin for almost every other pair of trousers ever made.
Of course they had a brilliant time, and have come home exhausted and smelling of sweat and cow pats, and covered in painful looking round scarlet patches where other people successfully shot them: they look rather like there has been an outbreak of bubonic plague in Windermere.
I have listened to several breathless stories of dashing bravely up hills and kidnapping the flag and hiding behind things. It all sounds to have been jolly good fun, so much so that the more I listened, the more I felt profoundly glad that I had resisted the suggestion to join in with them and instead spent the time peacefully folding pyjamas and then sitting on the taxi rank.
They went off after that to Oliver’s room to shoot more things, this time on the PS3, and I went to work to contemplate our imminent empty nest. I popped home once or twice, to listen to more stories of bravado and bruises. I told them a lot how clever I thought they were, but I have run out of admiration by now, there is only so much hero worship you can dredge up for brave paintballers, so eventually I retreated back to the taxi rank.
I am off home for an early night shortly, because I need to go and read a last bedtime story to our departing boy, and Mark can take over the income generation project.
…and we don’t have to get up in the morning…
