The swallows are here.
I heard them this morning and went rushing out into the garden to see, and they are really here, soaring and whirling and diving and calling their wonderful summer cry.
It is the most fantastic, hopeful moment: we have lasted through another winter and things will start to get better.
I know it is not like being a farmer where you have got to spend every winter dragging suicidal sheep out of ditches and brambles and wishing that they would have their lambs somewhere safe and sensible where you could keep a decent eye on them: but all the same the winter is always such a long hard stretch for us: and now the sun is shining, and the swallows are here, and the worst is over.
It feels very celebratory.
* * *
Dearie me, I had hoped that when I returned to this diary I might have written rather more than just a paltry hundred and thirty six words.
The terrible thing is that the celebratory feeling turned into an actual celebratory party and now I am intoxicated.
We were not celebrating the return of the swallows, magnificent as that event is, it does not really merit having half of the night off work and sinking a bottle of Bollinger and several glasses of our best French cognac.
It all started off so well. Mark fixed the camper van, and Number Two Daughter went to work, and I made some new curtains for our bedroom. You can see these if you can see the photographs at the top of the page, I am very smug about them because they are made of the end of a roll of gorgeous heavy fabric that I bought from the man on Barrow market when he was trying to get rid of it and also feeling generously inclined, in total they have cost me less than fifteen quid and they are so thick and velvety-rich that I couldn’t carry both of them together.
Anyway, I made curtains, and then everybody came home and we went out to vote, which was confusing because of having a second choice, and led to some squabbling in the polling booths and all of us trying to see how the others had voted. This made the ladies on the desk laugh: they were bored because they had only had a hundred voters all day.
I thought that this was sad, because really if you don’t vote then you have got no right to complain about anything ever. I am not very interested in the police and crime commissioner: except the last one who I met several times and liked very much, we escaped from a very dull meeting together once and laughed a great deal: he was a genuinely splendid chap. I didn’t know very much about these candidates except the leaflets they have all shoved through the door, but all the same we thought that we ought to vote, because of being socially responsible citizens and thus obviously better and more worthy people than everybody else who forgot.
Anyway after we voted Mark and I went out to work and Number Two Daughter went to see some friends, and it was all peacefully dull until about nine o’clock when she called us in a state of great excitement to tell us she had been offered the dream job that she had been longing for, teaching people to slide down a mountain in Canada called Big White for the winter.
Since we had been on the taxi rank for two hours and made rather less than ten pounds between us we kindly offered to help her celebrate.
We went home and had the loveliest evening.
We opened a bottle of champagne, which we drank, and we got giggly and congratulatory, and then we opened the cognac and thought how much we all loved each other, and then remembered that Mark and I have got a parents’ meeting at Oliver’s school tomorrow morning, and very much more might be ill-advised.
We just had a little bit more, because we were having such a good time. We ate some vodka and elderflower flavoured chocolates as well, which were interesting and marvellous but which did not exactly soak up the alcohol as we had hoped.
It is now very late. Since I have not earned any money and I am going to be unwell in the morning I had better go to bed. We have had the nicest, happy, pleased with the world evening. Number Two Daughter has done very well to get this job. We are all very glad indeed.
See you tomorrow.
Hurrah. xx
