Mark is not very well.
He is not ill enough not to come to work, obviously. So far neither of us has ever been ill enough to miss a Saturday night. We have had some dodgy unpleasant adventures trying not to burst stitches or lose stomach contents, but we have never missed a Saturday night’s takings.
Indeed, before our trip to Paris this spring, and once when I went to a reunion of old school friends, the last time we had a Saturday night off was 2011. Even when Mark was working away with a real job, the sort with wages and over time and National Insurance, sometimes he would come home and drive a taxi on a Saturday night, just to keep me company.
This is a tiresome nuisance sometimes, because anybody who is doing anything nice always does it on a Saturday. Nobody that I know of, except me and Mark, obviously, gets married on a Tuesday.
It had got to be a Tuesday, because the nightclub was closed, and it also had to be after half past four in the afternoon, because most of our friends drive taxis as well, and had school runs to do.
Mark is not missing tonight either, because of the school fees. He has drugged himself as much as we think he can decently manage to do without being poisoned or unfit to drive, and he has come to work.
Up until then he spent the whole day asleep in bed. Whatever his ailment is has caused his eyes and ankles to swell up, and so we propped him up on pillows at either end in a sort of V shape, in the hope that all misplaced fluid would eventually dribble down to the middle. Some of it seems to have, but he still looks like somebody who might have got drunk and then been rude to the doormen on the local night club.
I don’t mind telling you that I am quite worried about him, because when we took his blood pressure it was much higher than it ought to be, and wish that we lived in the sort of place that had already invented weekend medical care. Obviously we could pretend that he was an emergency and go to the hospital, but he isn’t an emergency, he is just miserable and uncomfortable and swollen and sick.
I did all of the jobs at home whilst he slept. This was not especially onerous because the fire is out so we did not need logs bringing in, and I did most of the cooking yesterday. I cut up salad and fruit for our taxi picnic, in the hope that eating healthy things would make him better again, or at the very least, not make him sick.
It was a peaceful sort of day. Lucy was in bed as well, with revision and a headache, and so it was just me and the dogs.
They were brilliantly well behaved. In between chopping lettuce and pegging washing we had several gentle ambles around the Library Gardens, and they were amazingly good. They walked to heel when I told them to, and came back when I called them, even on the one time when they had met another dog with a nice-smelling bottom and would have preferred to stay where they were.
I was very pleased, but did wonder if perhaps they were not very well as well. I am beginning to feel a bit like the sole survivor.
In the end of course we came to work, where we sat in the taxi rank drinking tea and watching Number One Daughter on the Internet, lifting heavy things in Madrid. She is doing very well, they have moved up to tenth place. This is ace.
Tomorrow is the last day of the competition.
Maybe Mark will be a bit better then.
Lucy goes back to school then as well.
