I am so tired I can hardly keep my eyes open.
I have eaten far too much and am sitting in front of the computer feeling rotunderous, like the sort of whale that turns up occasionally to lie helplessly on a beach in Norway, with activists milling round it wondering how to serve plankton.
We had to get up this morning at six o’ clock. Six o’clock.
To put it into perspective for all people for whom mornings form a regular part of their life experience: it is like you being asked to get up at midnight and start your day from there.
Usually we are only just in bed at the end of the night shift at six. It is not a time of day with which I am terribly familiar any more.
I had to be at Oliver’s school for half past nine. Because Mark hadn’t finished fixing my car I had to take him and the dogs to the farm first.
I didn’t fall asleep on the way but it would have been nice.
Once I got to school I had to find him. I wandered about all over the place before some other child told me that he had gone home ages ago, and eventually I found him standing next to the boot of the car having already loaded all of his things into it.
Once we had got the preliminaries over and done with, meaning that he had got into the car, used up all the rude words he could think of and then eaten his tuck, he told me about school. He appears to be in Remedial Latin but has been awarded the football prize and achieved Assassin grade in shooting.
How jolly proud I was.
When we got home there was a great deal of unpacking and cleaning things. He seemed to have brought half of Yorkshire home with him, and it had to be bashed off his boots into the back garden, so I jolly well hope the football pitch doesn’t have club root or anything awful.
It took three loads of washing and a great deal of scrubbing before everything was done, and now every spare space in the house has been filled with damp and dangling sports socks and games kit. School occasionally sends detailed letters about what we should do with rugby kit, what we should do with football kit, etc, but since I have never worked out which is which I don’t much bother. It gets shoved through the wash and stuffed back in his bag.
There has had to be a good deal of prompt sorting out because we are going on holiday on Sunday, and my usual practice of dumping everything in the loft and worrying about it another time won’t work. He needs clothes to wear in France.
We unpacked things and repacked things and carried things up and down the stairs until it was done.
We had invited Twiglet for dinner as well, so I had to make more effort with that than just producing cheese and crackers out of the cupboard again. This was probably a good thing from the point of view of providing balanced nourishment, except that I made a massive pan of Turkish lamb, followed by banana pudding, and I ate so much that I had to loosen my trousers surreptitiously afterwards.
Despite this physical discomfort we had a very happy evening, talking about taxis and giggling. Twiglet always knows if there is any fascinating gossip in Windermere, and also he has volunteered to be in charge of supervising the house and garden and allotment whilst we are away, which he will probably do more efficiently than we do.
It was not a late night, because Twiglet has a school run and I have got gluttony-induced indigestion, so we said early goodnights, and now I am going to bed.
Going on Sunday…
