Friends

A friend of ours called Dave, whom I have known for years, like very much, but see only very occasionally, turned up to visit and stay last night.

He had to come from Wales, and in the end didn’t arrive until ten o’clock. Being middle-aged and fairly staid, this is usually my retiring hour, however because I was so very pleased to see him I stayed up late, talking and philosophising and drinking tea and catching up on stories.

Mark was working on the night shift, but came in for an hour around eleven to discuss a building project which Dave was plotting: to transform a house and a shop into some wonderful bedsitters to be rented out to grateful contract workers in Barrow-in-Furness, the end impressive purpose of which was to provide Dave with a pension fund.

They were planning to visit it the next day and talk about contracts and quotes with a firm of builders, which prospect interested them both very much indeed, and they pored over plans and talked about plumbing for ages. I was polite for a while, but secretly thought it fairly uninteresting, and after a bit I sloped off upstairs to write letters to people and read about other people’s doings on Facebook.

The huge mistake that I made was coming back downstairs at midnight when Mark went back out to work, to carry on chatting to Dave instead of doing the sensible thing and going to bed. We had a glass of wine then, and it wasn’t long before we got to reminiscing about old times, when we were friends twenty years ago, which was ace, and in an act of monumental stupidity inspired by my happiness at seeing Dave again, in the end I didn’t actually get into bed until four, which was when Mark was coming in from work.

The thing is that this was perfectly all right for Mark and Dave, who did not have to get up and do a school run in a taxi this morning, but I had neglected to consider this fairly critical difference, and waking up at seven the next morning was a truly horrible experience.

I had optimistically wondered if Mark might like to get up and make me a supportive cup of coffee, but funnily enough he wasn’t having any of it, and when the alarm went off he just switched it off with the dispiriting advice that it was time for me to get up.

I got up and drank a lot of coffee, which didn’t help at all, and took the dog for a sleepy amble round the Library Gardens where we stood for ages and watched a crow tear a piece of paper carefully into small fragments, and then gather them all carefully in its beak before launching into weighty and unbalanced flight in the direction of its own important little building project.

After my school run I made Oliver’s breakfast and chased the two aspirational property developers out of bed to go off and inspect Project Pension Enhancement, and meet the real builders whilst I got some more sleep. This would have been better if a recorded person from Barclays hadn’t kept phoning me up to explain some irresistible offer that they were doing. I never found out what it was.

I got up again, grumpily and without much sleep, at half past ten to find that they had buzzed off on their quest, leaving their breakfast pots in the sink. I washed up, feeling noble, and hung the washing on the line, tidied up, phoned the insurance company and made Oliver some pancakes for lunch.

I considered starting on the ironing, because I had got a guilty sackful waiting, and even got the ironing board out in a burst of enthusiasm, but my radio has broken and it is tedious to do ironing in silence. I inspected the radio to see if it might be repairable, but realised that the chances of this had been much diminished by Mark’s cannibalising several bits of it to fix Oliver’s game-playing chair, which boasts Full Surround Sound and Realistic Vibratory Action and now contains several bits of deceased kitchen radio and means that I can no longer stay up-to-date with Woman’s Hour and The Archers.

At one o’ clock it was time for me to go to work, but there was no sign of Bodgitt and Scarper returning. I phoned Mark twice and in the end it was quite clear when he answered that they were in the pub.

I was very cross.

I mean really cross, because I was going to work, and Mark was supposed to be looking after Oliver, which he had forgotten.

Oliver said he didn’t care, because he was on his way out to the park anyway, so I threatened Mark with all sorts of horrible consequences if he didn’t come back and fulfil his parental responsibilities forthwith, and went to work, phoning Oliver every ten minutes, much to his irritation, to make sure he hadn’t been kidnapped or mortally injured on the slide, until Mark called me to let me know that he was back, and I could leave the feelings of guilt and inadequacy up to him.

I stayed cross all afternoon, and I can tell you that I would now be writing this with a newly single outlook on life had it not been that when I got home from work it turned out that my friend Elspeth had decided to pop round for a visit. Mark buzzed off hastily to work, and Elspeth made some cups of tea and sat patiently and listened to me being cross.

I did the ironing whilst I grumbled, and it was much better even than listening to Radio 4. She even gave me an update on The Archers and the election campaign, and after a bit I felt better.

She was fairly sure that neither assault nor divorce were appropriate responses to Mark forgetting to call me and tell me that he might be late because he was going to get some lunch at the pub, and in the end I reluctantly agreed not to instigate either. She also thought that after catching up on all of the missed sleep I might actually believe her.

I am very glad to have friends. They make your life so much nicer. I am going to go and see if she is right.