No matter how hard you try, any day which does not actually start until half past two in the afternoon is not going to be a runaway success.
We had, in the end, a madly busy night last night. The nightclub was open, despite it being Sunday, and the village stayed full of enthusiastic holiday revellers until the birds were starting to sing.
We rushed about in the night for absolutely ages, chugging remorselessly up and down the hill until eventually the last of the party-goers had been returned to their homes, or at least to somebody’s home, that sort of thing seems to be quite flexible after about three in the morning.
Finally we made our own way back home, yawning and stiff. We emptied the impatient dogs and then happily counted the proceeds into paper-clips of a hundred pounds each, before collapsing wearily into an exhausted sleep just before six this morning.
I don’t know why I had fondly imagined that I would be cheerily awake, bright and ready for adventure, at somewhere around ten.
The actuality was an unpleasant shock.
We didn’t even leap out of bed then. Mark crawled groggily downstairs to arrange some coffee, and we sat quietly for a little while, groaning and trying to persuade our eyes to steam open properly.
After that the day was never going to be a triumph of achievements.
I did not even go for a walk. This was partly because it was raining with a shoe-soaking grey determination, and partly because there was now not nearly enough day for us to pack all of our things in an organised and leisurely fashion, ready for tomorrow’s holiday adventure.
There wasn’t nearly enough day, because of course the weekend is still not over, and we had got to come to work tonight.
Despite this I managed to organise most of the packing, change the sheets and clean all of our shoes. Mark retired to the camper van to finish trimming the frayed bits off the newly-installed carpet. Also he had got to replumb the poor frost-bitten leaking taps and work out why the electrical gadget he has just fitted does not do anything at all.
He did not manage to achieve the last of these goals, and just took it out, grumpily. We will have to try and get our money back. This might be difficult because it has been sitting in the shed waiting to be installed for nearly a year now. It has probably got senile dementia.
The children packed their own clothes, which is one of the happy things about children who are accustomed to being regularly dispatched off to boarding school. They are perfectly well used to arriving and then having to manage without all the things they have forgotten, at least until the post turns up. I threw some things into a bag rather haphazardly, counting my underwear and Mark’s socks a bit vaguely, and hoping that we had got enough clean trousers without oil or paint stains.
We have finalised our holiday arrangements now, after some meaningful family discussion, mostly whilst we were drinking coffee in bed this afternoon. After Day One, which will involve illicit overnight camping in some car park in Manchester, for Day Two we are going to go to Blackpool and camp illicitly there as well. We are going to cycle and eat things and at night we are going to go to the cinema.
We are going to see an exciting looking film about somebody who plays computer games. We are all pleased about this, because even if the plot is rubbish it is in 3D and we will enjoy the spectacularly scary bits. I like 3D very much indeed.
Also it will be brilliant to go to the cinema in Blackpool, where it will be properly modern and the projector works and we know that we will not be sent home halfway through. Bowness cinema has not caught up with the times, partly because tourists think that it is wonderfully quaint. We still get the Wurlitzer organ coming up through the floor and the adverts are all filmed in the village, so if you are very unlucky you might catch a glimpse of yourself, probably employing taxi-driver hand signals as you go about your daily business. Some of Peter Rabbit was filmed in the village, they closed all the roads to do it, but we know we are not in that because we deliberately went somewhere else when they did it.
We are on the taxi rank now, and we will leave as soon as we get up in the morning.
I had better set an alarm.
Have a picture of a family holiday.
