Unknown

My life has changed.

All manner of things are different today from the way they were even a couple of weeks ago.

Mark is away all of the time. He is out every day trying to make rural broadband happen. He is not earning any money for this. Neither is his friend Ted. Eventually if they work hard and are clever enough they will become dot com millionaires, which I think is what you call somebody who has become rich by knowing how a computer works. Even if they don’t manage this then he will still have a taxi, so that will be all right.

All the same, because he has got to get up early in the mornings to be at work by eight o’ clock, he is finding it very difficult to work until late at night in the taxi. He has been having to stop working and go home and go to bed much earlier than usual.

We have thought about this quite a bit. It doesn’t really matter a great deal at the moment, because it is winter and we are not earning any money anyway.

All the same, it has needed some careful contemplation, and so this week I have reorganised our finances.

I have taken out a low-interest loan to be repaid over the next five years, and with it I have cleared the credit card and paid all of our bills up until Easter.

I am now free of the whole weekly horror of trying to raise enough money to cover school fees and the mortgage and the credit card and all the rest.

I am free from the awfulness of the winter daily income calculations, the heart-plummeting of being forty quid short, the hideously expensive dipping into the overdraft or credit card, all of which we inevitably do and then finish up paying back in the springtime.

I think that probably it is going to be worth it just for the credit card really, because our low interest rate ends this month and the horrible financial screws were about to start to tightening on our poor squeaking bank account. The thing is that the loan interest is so low that we will be paying less on the whole lot than we would have done just for the dreadful credit card, even if it takes the whole five years to pay it back, which I jolly well hope it won’t. After all, I don’t have any other bills to pay now.

I don’t suppose really that we will pay it all back in the next few months, because I know me better than that. This doesn’t matter, because it is over such a long time that the repayments won’t especially hurt us anyway, especially once the summer comes.

If Mark becomes a dot com millionaire then it won’t matter anyway.

The money arrived in the bank today, and I paid everything. I paid absolutely everything, because we still had last week’s takings in the bank, so I even paid for Oliver’s flute lessons and the Autoparts bill and the last payment on the year’s council tax.

It was a strangely unfamiliar, empty sort of feeling.

I have got nothing at all to worry about.

Mark was out at his new job.

The lodger came and went a few times, but she is busy moving out. She  starts her new tenancy in her flat on Saturday, and has been in an oblivious haze of thinking about furniture.

The house was clean and tidy.

The children are away.

I do not need any shopping.

It was the most peculiar thing that has happened to me for a long time.

Suddenly I realised that I was so tired I could hardly keep my eyes open.

I went to bed and slept like a grizzly bear in a hole, the sort that only breathes once every couple of minutes so as not to waste any energy. The alarm clock woke me up some time in the afternoon, but really I could have slept for an awful lot longer.

I put my boots on and took the dogs out for a long walk in the rain. They were very pleased indeed about this.

I walked and walked and thought.

I do not have anything to worry about.

I do not have an impossible list of jobs that I need to try and scramble through.

I do not need to go anywhere.

Suddenly I do not know what to do or what I would like to think about. Then I thought, uncomfortably, that I don’t know what I want to do when I can choose for myself.

I don’t think I know who I might be.

I don’t quite know if I like that feeling.

In the end I went to work. I am not missing Mark because he has gone to his maths class. It is all right being at work, because at least I know how that should go.

It is all very unexpected.

I will keep you posted.

Have a picture of a wet dog.