Well, I am home, although of course by at home I mean in the usual sense of being on the taxi rank, which I suppose could count as a home in certain senses of the word. It is familiar, we get very cross with invaders, and it could do with a jolly good clean up.
Mark has gone. He has charged off to Aberdeen to uplift the family finances once again. I am relieved about this, we are having an expensive year, although it has been the shortest of short home visits, and I will miss him.
It has been an extremely busy visit, actually, because of the two MOTs, and really I have hardly seen him. There is a small, guilty part of me that is actually feeling a bit relieved that the week is over and he has buzzed off, because of course he has not had any time to do anything other than wag bits of ball joint about and squirt spray grease on suspension. This has meant that everything else, like laundry, cooking and cleaning, has been my problem, and I have been entirely occupied with feeding both Mark and Oliver, in between rushing off to work to keep the cash flow going.
Mark has gone now, and Oliver goes away on Sunday, and so my life is going to drift back into its usual peaceful pace, with no more frantic sandwich preparation for a while.
I am not exactly sorry.
Of course we woke up this morning a long way from home, actually in a rather embarrassingly downmarket hotel in Oldham, not far from Lucy’s house. I had chosen it because of its undoubted merit of being the only hotel in Oldham, and even then it wasn’t full, so presumably they are not greatly reliant on their tourist trade. It was a red-brick affair called Two Hundred and Forty Seven, although it turned out that this was not the way you were supposed to say it.
It was clean and functional, which was all that mattered, although our skylight window did not have any curtains, and I was woken up at six by bright daylight. You couldn’t open the window more than an inch either, presumably in case you either jumped or chucked the duvet out, I live in a tourist area and know that hotel guests can behave in some startlingly peculiar ways. This meant that the room became uncomfortably warm, and Mark soaked his shirt in cold water and wore it to sleep. He said that it helped, although I was not tempted to try it on my own behalf.
We emerged at nine this morning, only to find that breakfasts were not provided. We had prudently abandoned Mark’s taxi at the restaurant the night before, because of the half-dozen bottles of wine, and had to telephone Lucy and Jack to collect us.
They have got blackout curtains on their windows, and were not awake, so we set off walking.
This was an interesting, and not exactly unpleasant experience. There are pavements along the side of Oldham’s dual carriage way, although they were so overgrown it didn’t look as though anybody had walked there for a couple of generations, and one bit of it had peculiar lumpy bricks, the sort of thing intended to deter homeless sleepers, had any of them ever been so desperate as to curl up in such a noisily uncomfortable spot.
Jack found us in the end, and we made our way back to Lucy’s, where we had a joyful reunion with the dogs, followed by a superlatively excellent breakfast at the cafe on the corner of her road. This is one of the most magnificent things about Oldham, serving the most colossal Full English breakfast with toast, tea and crispy bacon for a fiver, and we had everything.
It is a good job I don’t live at Lucy’s house. I would not be a Size Eight for very long. I would soon be a sausage-flavoured Size Twenty Two with hash browns on the side.
Of course they had their life to get on with, and we couldn’t keep interrupting it all day, and so in the end we set off for home.
I am here now, and in bed. It is long after midnight, and I concluded the day by watering the garden, also shortly after midnight, in the dark. I surprised myself by feeling uncomfortably furtive, as though I was trying not to be noticed, although actually Mark left me the length of hose before he went, and I thought I would wait until after dark in order not to scorch the poor thirsty plants in the sunshine.
We do not have a hosepipe ban here, although the weather is unseasonably lovely.
I say unseasonably, because it is never the season for sunshine here in the Lake District. Mostly it is the Monsoon Season, with occasional breaks for winter and some heavy rain.
I am enjoying the wonderful sunshine very much indeed.
