holiday

wishful thinking

It's a Bank Holiday, apparently. I am always taken by surprise when they come along, as they have never featured particularly in my working life, which has either been at sea, where they don't count, or self-employed, where they don't count. I know they're going on because supermarkets get horribly crowded as people panic buy the essentials to keep them going during the one day that the shops will be closed, except that shops don't tend to close on Bank Holidays these days.... and there will be queues on the M5 heading into the West Country, followed by queues on the M5 heading out of the West Country.

All in all, a good time to stay at home. Going out and about on a Bank Holiday provokes in me the feeling, described by Evelyn Waugh, that Basil Seal experiences at the outbreak of the Second World War, in, I think, Put Out More Flags: "like being in the middle of a South American revolution, but being oneself a South American."

I may have paraphrased.

K is away with the Other Parent, on her Other Hols. I texted the OP yesterday: There is something odd going on the sun is shining in Bristol. She replied There is something even odder going on- it is pissing with rain and freezing cold in the south of france.

I continue to get the flat tidy, or at least less messy, in readiness for K's return in time to start school in September. She will be living with me after some years of living in the Other Place, and we're all treading cautiously into the new order of things.

I have a friend who has three children and an estranged partner, and they arrange things such that the children live in the same house and the parents alternate staying with them. K is very struck by the felicity of the solution. I can, of course, think of all sorts of reasons why it wouldn't or couldn't work in our case, but then I would, wouldn't I?