I took Lucy back to school this afternoon.
We stopped on the way to buy her more jeans and underwear, because children always need you to buy things for them, even if you think that they have already got absolutely everything in the whole world. It always turns out that they haven’t, and even if you are trying to save up to have two nights in an hotel in York you have got to bite the bullet and spend your money on children instead.
Afterwards I had got to feed her before I left her at school, and we went to a restaurant called Pizza Hut, which, it turned out, was at least remarkably cheap.
I have been there before with her but did not realise until it was too late that it was the same place and hence finished up eating the same astonishing gooey things as last time.
I think they organise their cooking to be suitable for people who don’t have any teeth, which turned out to be handy as I am still not quite recovered from the toothache. It was squishy food, without a glass of wine, because they don’t do that, and by the time I had had enough I felt very greasy. I caught Lucy wiping her hands on her trousers, which made me squeak with horror like an old-fashioned parent, it might have been an economical sort of place but they did at least have napkins.
I dropped her off at school and drove back over the windswept fells to try and get back as early as I could to go to work.
This was because it turns out that we have not been very successful at all in our project of saving up to go to York, because Mark spent some money as well.
His car needed two new tyres and a handbrake cable for its MOT tomorrow. Taxis have lots of MOTs, which is probably a good thing really. Because of all these things, by the time we went out to work this evening we had got a lot less money than we had had in the morning, which is not at all the way that saving up for something is supposed to work.
We sat on the taxi rank doing holiday-in-York sums because we had got until midnight to cancel it if we couldn’t afford it. We knew that the sensible thing to do would be to stay at home, because of not having any money.
I thought that it might be better not to mention that we have just had the bill for Oliver’s flute lessons as well.
On top of that, now it is almost midnight and even though Mark has been out on the taxi rank since five and I have been here since half past eight, neither of us has had a job yet
All the same, we didn’t cancel it.
I am pleased to tell you that we decided to go anyway, because we thought that maybe next weekend might be busy and that we would earn some money.
This is reckless and financially irresponsible because in the meantime we will have to pay for it with Mark’s credit card, and this could mean that we are starting to become like the sort of terribly despairing people who phone up You And Yours on Radio Four because they have made a mess of their lives and don’t have any money left and have got to go to food banks and borrow from payday loan companies at a thousand percent interest.
We considered that dreadful prospect on the taxi rank tonight.
Of course one of the things I like very much about my job is that we never know how much we are going to earn. We might come home at the end of the night with money stuffed in every available pocket, or we might have bought fuel and be in negative equity, it is a surprise every time.
This means that I can look hopefully at the future and believe that it will probably be all right: and I do believe that it will be all right. Even if next weekend is rubbish, sooner or later the daffodils will come out, and visitors will come back to the Lake District, and we will be able to earn money again.
Before all of that happens we will have a brilliant trip to York.
We are looking forward to it so much.
Only one more day and then we will be going.
