Number One Daughter is in a competition for being very fit.
She has been in lots of these competitions, and this one is an international one. After this one, the winners, who will be the very fittest people in Europe and Africa, go off to America to see who can walk in their hands for the longest and jump on and off enormous boxes the most times.
I have watched her doing this. I could not even do it once. I am very impressed indeed. She looks very small and fragile on the picture, you would never guess that she would pack a punch which could easily fell a charging rhinoceros.
We are following her progress with interest. She is in a team in this one, and so far they are eleventh. There are still two days to go. It is adding a small frisson of excited suspense to our otherwise uneventful lives.
I do like having children, they do such interesting things. Number Two Daughter is driving a digger and Lucy is doing her GCSEs and Oliver is campaigning at school for social justice.
We did not do anything interesting. We had to spend the morning organising ourselves ready for the weekend before we could dash off to the farm. Mark cleaned the cars out and I cooked sausages and chicken and coffee chocolate and mixed some black currants and honey yoghurt with cream and cream cheese for puddings.
After that I made some moisturiser and some wet wipes. These are because Mark’s eczema is sore at the moment, and he thinks that shop moisturisers are not as good. Ours is heavy and oily, and works even when he has neglected to look after his skin for a while, and it is beginning to look like something that a lizard might have outgrown.
We did go to the chemist to see if they had anything for it, and the lady behind the counter said that he should have seen a doctor and asked how long he had had it. He said that it had been since he was six, and she looked at it and pulled a face and said that he should be going to the doctor straight away, as an emergency.
Mark did not consider an itchy patch on his leg to be a medical emergency, and so we went back home and coated it with some more oily moisturiser, which he said made it feel better.
When we had finished clearing up accidental smears of coconut oil and shea butter from the kitchen we were finally free to dash off to the farm to play on the camper van. This is the most satisfying thing in the world to be doing at the moment.
Mark is still rebuilding the dashboard and I am still wobbling about on the interesting scaffolding. Mark put a bit of wood underneath one of the legs, which helped a bit, but it is still a Laurel and Hardy moment waiting to happen, especially with half a dozen dogs charging about underneath it, rolling around and barking.
After about five minutes of happy dibbling paint around, the alarm went off to tell us it was time to go home.
We packed up as disconsolately as children at the end of a sunny playtime, because of course it is weekend now, and we have got to be fiscally responsible for at least ten hours a day until Monday comes around again.
Monday isn’t really a long time away.
By then we will know how Number One Daughter and her team have got on in the international line up of super fit stars.
We have got everything crossed for them
