Everybody went out.
The junior downstairs lodger went to school.
The senior upstairs lodger went to work.
Mark and the dogs went to the farm.
That left me.
I washed up breakfast pots and stuck everybody’s laundry into the machine. Then I made biscuits and chocolates and tidied up.
I remembered to take the harvest from yesterday’s clear out to the charity shop. I was pleased with myself about this. They asked for my phone number and email address so that they could stay in touch with me, but I declined, having no inclination to be any more benevolent than providing supplies of old cardigans and unreliable jigsaws.
I paid our takings into the bank and then went on the Internet and spent them all on school fees.
Whilst I was online I recalled, too late, that I had got to save some more money for booking a Speed Awareness Course.
This, for once, was for me, not Mark.
The notice arrived ages ago, telling me that the police were not pleased to have observed me driving at thirty five miles an hour in a thirty limit area.
This did not seem unreasonable to me, as when I read the letter carefully it turned out to be in a place about ten minutes away from Oliver’s school, at a time about five minutes before I was supposed to get there.
Had I not spotted the speed camera when I did I would have been going a lot faster, but as Mark observed afterwards, it is difficult to slow down when you are airborne.
The police said that I could choose between some penalty points and a course for Naughty Motorists.
Actually I would have preferred the penalty points, but we get in trouble if we have got too many of these when we drive taxis. I don’t have any at the moment, and would quite like to keep my career options open, so reluctantly I settled for the lecture, probably given by somebody who drives a lot less than I do and has had more accidents.
I surveyed my options gloomily. There are no Naughty Motorist Courses in Windermere, so it would have to be somewhere miles away. It turns out that they are all run by different companies, so you have got to look on lots of different websites and decide which will be the least inconvenient.
It looked ghastly. I could choose between Barrow and Milnthorpe and Kendal, all of them run in horrible adult re-education centres with dreadful plastic chairs and laminated explanations in the toilets about how to wash your hands properly.
Then suddenly I discovered to my happiness that Lancashire Police, who have obviously discovered civilisation, were running their courses in the function room of the Holiday Inn in Lancaster.
I have been to the Holiday Inn in Lancaster before. It is on the motorway junction, and has got a very comfortable lounge bar and a swimming pool and toilets with flowers and neatly laundered hand towels.
It occurred to me that I could have a very pleasant afternoon out there, starting with lunch and a glass of wine, and then a warm snooze in the Naughty Motorists Course, followed by probably having to persuade Mark to come and collect me.
This appealed very much.
I booked it.
I didn’t have any money left then, actually I was down to negative money, so we will have to make some proper effort not to shirk out of work this week.
I went downstairs and was making our picnic when Mark came home.
He said that we should have a snooze for the rest of the afternoon because of getting up to wave the junior lodger off to school and then working all night. He said that the thing to do was to have a nice glass of wine whilst we finished making the picnic, and then slope off upstairs to bed.
This seemed to me to be so rascally it was irresistible, so we did it.
I made him wash the glasses up before we went upstairs, so that the lodgers would not know about such disreputable carryings-on.
When we got up it was going dark and we had to go to work.
I am at work now. It has not been a bad day.
I shall have a nice afternoon in an hotel and a pointless driving licence.
The picture is of Ritalin Boy, who started his new school today, and who has been splendidly brave even though it was scary. Shorts are a brilliant idea for small boys. Knees are much less trouble to wash than trousers.
