We are home, in the usual homey way of being on the taxi rank. Oliver and Emily have gone to work, whilst Lucy and Jack, who have the unimaginable luxury of working in jobs which pay them whether they turn up or not, have booked themselves into the hotel in York for an extra night. They are milling about visiting Dick Turpin’s old haunts and admiring the Viking graffiti.
We did not rush home. We had the usual hotel indulgence of a colossal breakfast with eggs and sausages and everything else hotels dream up to encourage cholesterol in their guests, and then ambled around the Designer Outlet. This is a place where designer brands pretend that they are selling things for a discount whilst actually just getting rid of stuff they might otherwise have chucked in the dustbin or dumped in TK Maxx. I am indifferent to designer brands, and so it is largely wasted on me, but we did stop at a shop selling arty materials to pick up some modelling clay with which I can begin to fashion some fairies for the garden.
We have been looking up ways to do this. The choice is between cutting shapes out of a large lump of something or making a stick-shape and building it up. We watched a very interesting video of people cutting the shapes of fairground rides out of polystyrene and then covering them with fibre glass to make them permanent, after which they sawed all of the polystyrene out again. This looked quite remarkably spectacular, although possibly rather difficult, and although I would have liked a go very much, I quailed at the thought of clearing up the conservatory after I had spent a couple of days sawing lumps out of polystyrene.
Number Two Daughter once had a misadventure with an enormous bean bag which lingered for months.
Hence modelling clay seemed like the most promising medium with which to commence, and today we purchased some.
I will let you know how I get on.
We dawdled about the art shop, and then investigated Penhaligon’s. None of us purchased any pleasing scents, I have never forgiven Penhaligon’s for their personal re-invention during which they scrapped everything old and lovely that we liked, and introduced some newly modernised stuff in some truly naff bottles. I mean truly naff. They have got plastic stags’ heads on the lids and tartan ribbons. Hence we drifted about spraying one another with perfume and then declined to purchase any.
After that we went back to the hotel and settled ourselves on their very comfortable sofas for lunch.
Lunch was the highlight of the day, because we were meeting Nan and Grandad, whom we have not seen for ages and ages. Regular readers will recall that during the children’s school days, lunches with Nan and Grandad were a feature of our journeys to and from school, very much enjoyed by all of us, but of course once the children’s educational activities transferred to Scotland and Northampton it was no longer a practical arrangement, and had to be abandoned, rather regretfully, although on balance it was probably better for both my waistline and my cholesterol levels that we stopped when we did.
Today we were in York again and so we all seized the opportunity to catch up.
It was truly brilliant to see them again. Of course we have all become much older in the meantime, mostly the children. Oliver is no longer a squeaky almost-adolescent, and Lucy no longer has a pony tail and a lacrosse stick. Both of them are tall, and sensible, and of course both of them are now accompanied by partners, which couldn’t ever have been imagined during the olden-days of their single-sex boarding schools.
It was truly lovely to see Nan and Grandad, who are really quite remarkably unchanged. We are all a bit greyer, especially me, and a bit deafer, but they were as rosy and jolly as they have always been and it was a very merry sort of lunch. I would have liked to stay all afternoon and hear what they were doing in the garden, and how their other grandchildren, who are just embarking on the teenage adventure, are getting along, but of course we had got work tonight, and in the end we had to go.
When we got back to the Lake District it had been raining so hard that the new front garden was pooled with small floods, as is the taxi rank.
York is having a drought.
I do wish our beloved leaders could be as scrupulous at dividing the weather into equal shares as they are attempting to be with their benefits system.
It really doesn’t seem at all fair that some places get all of the sunshine.
