Taking vast swathes of the summer off means various work tasks and deadlines have piled up, and I only get to bed at 5.30am. My alarm wakes me two hours later, where one child is standing fully dressed for school, teeth brushed, book in hand, and reporting that the other two are downstairs just finishing their breakfasts now. I feel that I am a terrible parent who has also done something terribly right. Comme ci, comme ça.
By noon I have fallen asleep on my laptop on the living room floor, halfway through a freelance job. The doorbell is ringing. My friend is at the door, travelled from far distant lands, and come to take me to lunch in his mother’s borrowed soft-top, glinting outside in the sudden sun. We head out of town, towards a pub where they bring us tiny salted fish and roasted dates, pigeon and scallops and venison and fondant potatoes. We have bloody Marys, cherry soufflés, and I discover he hasn’t ever read The Secret History, or Prep, or I Capture the Castle, or even the Dark is Rising series, and I am filled with a great joy that those discoveries are lined up before him.
Back in the car, he says we can go anywhere but Ikea. I pick a vague direction, then we follow signs to any village whose name takes our fancy. There are tiny post-office-and-general-stores; dusty-looking pubs with men outside smoking and frowning at us; new builds like old cottages; old cottages like melting stone, which have crept so close to the road I worry they’ll keep flowing, blocking off those higher up the road altogether; chip shops full of children on their way home from school; lichened gates to weedy country house drives; a woman brushing horses in a field; an old stone cross, all passing, slide slide slide, no slowing, no stopping, no reasons.
We sing Christmas carols (I do the descant, when I can remember it; he does the bass, when he can) and I let the wind knot my hair and whip away our laughter. We scream at each other when we choose a bad song. We both feel sick from too much food, too much laughter, hairpin turns in a car which is part sun-lounger, part 3D-ride. I cannot stop laughing.
We drive straight to school to collect the elder two, and their faces as the roof slides back makes me hope they’ll remember this, how much they love it (for once, not Will they remember me, which is a nice break from my usual morbidity). For our final performance, the two of us sing In the Bleak Midwinter to the two of them, silent in the back of the car, dazzled by the sun and the car and the two adults who haven’t really changed since before these babies were born.
