Once again it has become terribly late, almost eleven, and I have not written a single word in these pages.
Tonight it was because I have been gassing on the telephone for most of the evening.
This is easily possible when the taxi rank is quiet. If I am not being interrupted by tiresome customers with bad legs just wanting to go around the corner, I can talk for ages.
I was talking to Elspeth, actually. She has started doing yoga, which she assures me that she is finding enormously beneficial. People start doing things like that when they get to our age, even the ones who were determined avoiders of all kinds of PE at school, which I was. Even my hairdresser has started doing Pilates. He explained what these were but I can’t have been listening properly because I have forgotten.
I think most of this sort of stuff is about stretching. I do quite a bit of that anyway, because Oliver has gone now, and Mark is off soon, and the top shelves in our kitchen were built either for somebody with very high heels or for an orang-utan. In any case, I do not feel any inclination to purchase a rolled up rubber mat and a leotard just yet. I am not nearly as stretchy as I was in my youth, but I am not quite yet in need of public humiliation.
The doctor doing Mark’s medical the other day told him to touch his toes. Mark asked if he wanted him to put his hands flat on the floor as well, and then did it, rather to the doctor’s surprise, so I don’t think he needs to worry about going to stretching classes either.
I have wasted a very lot of today doing tedious administrative tasks. Mark and the truck went off to the shed, to fit a new emission-reducing bit, but he does not think that it has made any difference, so we are just going to find another MOT inspector. I took the dogs off over the fell, where I occupied the entire journey contemplating a story that I would like to write, but then couldn’t write when I got home because I had to faff about trying to register Mark’s new jigsaw for its guarantee and then explaining to the Inland Revenue how I had managed to completely mess up last month’s payroll. Neither task happened smoothly and easily, and the first one involved quite a lot of shouting at Mark down the telephone as he attempted to decipher the serial number in the dark shed without his glasses on.
I felt decidedly frayed by the time I had finished. I have a suspicion that I have not heard the last of the Inland Revenue yet either.
Sometimes life can be frustrating.
I might start trying to write it tomorrow. I have got lots of very thrilling ideas, I could be JK Rowling in no time at all. Writing a new story was my original master-plan for January when nothing else is happening, although it has been derailed a bit by the camper van activities and Mark’s continued presence at home. I do not mind this, because I like both Mark and the camper van very much, but the story is still there, simmering gently, like the sort of curry into which you have chucked a pile of random and peculiar leftovers from the fridge, like ham and prawns and a soggy parsnip and some blackening bananas, and which might turn out rather well or be spectacularly awful and your husband will have to try and be polite about it.
It will be something exciting to look forward to when he has gone next week.
I am trying not to think about that. It has been very splendid to have him at home for an extra week. He has got to go on Thursday.
Thursday is going to be a bit of a scramble, because we are going to the theatre in Manchester on Wednesday night, and staying down there, so he will have to take me back home and then carry straight on up to Aberdeen.
We are going to see To Kill A Mockingbird, which was one of our favourite books.
I am looking forward to that as well.
