We have got Oliver at home.
Mark went home early from work last night, so that he could get some sleep, and I stayed out until the end.
It turned out that such a noble sacrifice was worth £12.80, but it was the thought that counted.
It felt worth a lot more than that when the alarm went off at half past six this morning. I buried my head in the pillow and hoped I might be dreaming, but I wasn’t.
I am not at all keen on this morning arrangement.
Mark had got to be at work by eight, so we fed him as much as we could stuff into him, like they do with geese, and he marched off bravely into the cold.
This new job has been the subject of some thoughtful contemplation. He is working with an old friend of his from his Land Rover racing days. These ended when we got married, because of not being able to afford both.
Curiously enough, his friend discovered a similar experience when he married, especially after they began to produce children, and so neither of them are racing any more.
Ted is now embroiled in a personal quest to bring broadband to rural backwaters, and has discovered that the project is rather too much for one chap by himself.
He is busily planting aerials all over South Lakeland, and not answering his telephone because it is ringing off the hook all the time with remote people wanting cheap broadband.
Mark thinks that rather than being an employee he would prefer to be part of the business, which is still in its very earliest infancy.
I think this is a brilliant idea, because nothing is more fun than not having any money and wondering whether you will ever earn any. However I am all in favour of taking your chances on the Sea of Fortune. We will never become rich if we are working for somebody else.
We probably won’t ever become rich whatever we do actually, but I would rather drown than be a passenger in somebody else’s boat. At least this way we know that whatever happens to us is All Our Own Fault.
All the same it would be brilliant if installing rural broadband turned out to be lucrative, and we could live in luxury and idleness in our advanced old age.
Hence Mark is getting up and investing his work in something which might or might not pay him any money some day.
This is both thrilling and quite awful. Watch this space.
I felt as though I should have been admiring of such early-morning enthusiasm, but I wasn’t, because of not having enough sleep. Instead I was grumpy.
I dashed around getting things like washing organised, and emptying the poor abandoned dogs. When we came back I gave them a bone each to growl over and went off to Yorkshire for Oliver.
It had snowed quite a bit on the fells, and the sun was low in the sky. These are not brilliant driving conditions, and I must have used about half a gallon of screen wash. When I got home it turned out that the car was absolutely encrusted in salt, no wonder it was hard to see out of the windows.
It seems hardly any time since we last saw Oliver, and indeed it won’t be very long until we see him again, because he is going back on Sunday, after which he has only got a week before the carol concert and the holidays.
He dashed upstairs to play on Star Wars The Newly Rehashed Adventure. This was his birthday present, and he has been longing to get a chance to play it for over a week.
Mark came home early, and we went to sleep until it was time to go to work.
I suppose we are used to doing things that don’t earn any money.
Have a picture taken at work.
