Proper grown up

Last night during a quiet half hour at work we had the brilliant idea that we would go to Blackpool to see the fireworks next Friday.

I liked this idea very much, because the fireworks in Blackpool are absolutely amazing, being an international competition, and are spectacularly set off over the sea. We have taken the children in the past, but they are both of the opinion that fireworks are dull, partly because I like firework displays such a lot that we have dragged the children to see dozens of them during their lifetimes.

Of course the children are away at school, and so did not have to be cajoled into agreeing that it would be a happy event, and so we only had our own arrangements to consider. We thought that we could go down in the camper van and have dinner in a nice restaurant, and we were so very taken with this delightful idea that we called my parents to see if they would like to join us, which they thought that they would.

We talked happily about this all evening, until the point when we got home and discovered a pile of financial worries sitting in envelopes on the doormat.

There were two brown envelopes from DVLA telling us that our taxis needed taxing, and two more from the council reminding us that the MOTs and taxi licences were about to expire, and another one from the bank, which was basically drawing our attention to the absence of useful numbers from our account. We gulped with horror and over a restorative glass of wine we stoically decided that we had better not take the night off after all, and that boring but solvent was preferable to jolly events and an overdraft.

It was four o’ clock in the morning so we did not call my parents, who are not usually still up at that time, so I sent them an apologetic email.

When we woke up this morning we felt more positive over coffee, which had somehow changed our philosophical standpoint about being boring but solvent, etc. We thought that maybe we would go after all, and Mark said that he would make up some of the money by mending another van for the man at the kebab shop.

When I phoned my parents with the cheery news I discovered that they had booked an hotel for the event, and then cancelled it again in the intervening time and so they were already beginning to feel quite grumpy with me. They were not in the least thrilled to discover that I had changed my mind again, and made some depressing but accurate observations about people who can’t be certain about their basic philosophical approach to life for more than five minutes at a time.

It appeared that they had no inclination at all to book the hotel again on the off chance that we would manage to organise our lives appropriately in the meantime, and firmly declined the renewed invitation to join us.

This was a relief, really, because we couldn’t really afford to miss a Friday night at work, but dampened my spirits considerably, partly on account of missing the fireworks but also because of being an unreliable idiot. I am reasonably accustomed to this experience, but I have been trying hard for a while to be a responsible adult, and it is not encouraging to have to embrace failure at the age of fifty.

Mark was sanguine about it, and we cheered ourselves up by looking at our pension fund which we have saved up painfully over the years and then invested in something called a SIPP, and which my father had informed me during our telephone conversation was doing quite well, so we looked, and it was, so now we have got £2,401 saved up for our retirement, or to cash in in an emergency when we are fifty five, which ever happens first.

This was splendid news, and we both felt quite buoyant about it, and it restored my faith in myself as a responsible adult, as if you have got a pension then you must be a real grown up.

In fact it is actually Mark’s pension. I am merely a grown up by association.

Close enough.