Going away for the weekend is all very nice until Monday morning. You wake up and the kids’ school uniforms aren’t washed, there’s no bread to make sandwiches for their lunch, the sheets and towels from the trip have been tossed in the laundry along with an inexplicably enormous bag of dirty underwear, you’ve run out of toilet paper and are reduced to scrounging for Kleenex, the front hall is piled halfway to the ceiling with suitcases plus six recycling bags filled with detritus from the trip … and you have to walk the Sprogs to school because Husband has dropped the car in for a service.
Oh, ok, that last bit doesn’t happen every time you go away. But the rest does. And it kind of takes the gloss off travel. Well, it does for me anyway (and I suspect mothers generally as fathers seem to regard their job being to transfer all the carefully packed bags to the car at the start of the trip, then return them to the hallway at the end – fairies do the rest, apparently).
Not having a car means I can’t drive to the supermarket to replenish supplies of toilet paper and bread and food generally. I’m not entirely sure what we’ll have for dinner tonight but it’ll have to be something light as I’ll be carrying all the ingredients home from the store and I don’t fancy spending more money on physio.
Speaking of physio – what do broke people do when their hurt their backs? Do they just lie in bed for a week moaning? Because the piss-poor $26 you get from your private medical fund for a $70 visit doesn’t help much. Come to think of it, if you’re broke you probably don’t have private medical insurance, which means it’s a big, fat $70 to get you back fixed, and I’ve been three times in two weeks, which equals $210, which almost hurts as much as my back injury.
Anyhoo, back to travel and my desperate need for a Tardis. As previously blogged, if I had a Tardis I wouldn’t have to pack half the house to take every time I went on a trip. I could be back by dark, with a quick stop at a Woolies for loo paper on the way home.
But I don’t, so I’ll be spending today unpacking half the house and washing dirty underwear.
I might indulge in another sort of Blue Monday while I work to cheer myself up …
How does it feel
To treat me like you do
When you’ve laid laid your hands upon me
And told me who you are
I thought I was mistaken
I thought I heard your words
Tell me how do I feel
Tell me now how do I feel
Those who came before me
Lived through their vocations
From the past until completion
They will turn away no more
And I still find it so hard
To say what I need to say
But I’m quite sure that you’ll tell me
Just how I should feel today …
I’m bopping already and I’ve only typed the words.
Oooooh … I really need to open that ’80s-themed small bar …
housegoeshome 
I will now have that song in my head all day – and that’s no bad thing. Please open your bar with a big screen for music videos. Seem to remember Blue Monday had a good one of those too.
Poor people end up all bent and crippled. Whereas middle income people end up poor, because they spent all their money on therapy, but they can still walk upright at 70. And the rich never physically age.