Sunday morning always starts with the pleasing dilemma of whether or not to get out of bed.
It is a difficulty every week. In my natural state I am as energetic as an elderly tabby cat in the mornings, and am quite happy to loaf around yawning and stretching and being brought coffee by Mark and encouraging him to rub my back. I like our bed very much indeed, because of the enormous feather duvet and fresh white cotton sheets, and although I have to acknowledge that it might be better without the dog it is still one of the very nicest places in the house. We had lit English Fern candles for half an hour before we went to bed, and even in the morning we were still breathing in the lovely scent, which was gorgeous to wake up to. However having opened the curtains a little crack to find an absolute flood of light cascading in I couldn’t help but be reluctantly aware that if I spent half of Sunday idling on goose down pillows and thinking vague philosophical thoughts there wouldn’t be any Sunday left for doing any of the lots of other things that I also like doing, so we had to get up, and we thought we might have a trek across the fell and go and pay a social call on Mark’s sister at the farm.
The sun was a bit watery when we set off: but the skies cleared and by the time we got there there was brilliant sunshine. It is a very nice walk, along what was once a medieval road for some of the way, and we found some frogspawn in a puddle and Mark told me stories about when he did hot-air ballooning and they had to rescue a balloon from an unexpected landing in one of the fields, and the dog charged about sniffing things and getting muddy, and we watched a pair of hawks circling on the thermals and listened breathlessly to the amazing prehistoric wild cries that they make, and Mark always insists on kissing me over the kissing gates which is nice when his nose is not runny. He took lots of photographs so I shall stick some of them on the end of here because I have worked out how to do it without too many problems now except for one the other day that mysteriously kept coming out upside down.
Mark’s sister was surprisingly pleased to see us considering we had a muddy dog and she was getting lunch ready. We helped them eat their lunch and caught up on all the most interesting family gossip and then talked about them in a speculative and satisfying sort of way as we walked back home, in the interested fashion that you do about other couples when you are married. It was windy on the way back, and we were rosy and warm apart from the cold noses when we got home. We pegged the washing out in the garden in the lovely breezy sunshine, and went to get some shopping, we must have been hungry because even the man at the checkout made surprised remarks about the quantity of chocolate we bought. The difficulty was that there were so many nice things to choose from, and we couldn’t, so we bought some blackberry and ginger chocolate, and some pear and almond chocolate, and some orange and macademia chocolate, and then some ordinary chocolate for the taxis and also some chocolate ginger biscuits to have with coffee, and a bottle of wine: and by then we had run out of money so everything else is going to have to wait until we have earned some more, which jolly well won’t be today.
Mark is building a new flowerbed in the garden whilst I write this, which is really exciting, it will be fantastic when it is done: and we are going to go off and have a swim and sauna when we have finished: and then spend the evening curled up on the sofa watching the thrilling Game Of Thrones DVD and eating interesting chocolate and drinking wine, which are all my absolute favourite things to do.
Almost as nice as muddy Spring walks or idling around in crisp cotton sheets.
LATER NOTE: The washing dried outside and smelled lovely.
We had a fantastic swim and scorching sauna and plunge in the ice.
We had leftover curry and lovely rich wine and chocolate and watched two episodes of Game of Thrones, which was just about all we could bear because of the excitement of it all.
I am posting this a bit early and going to bed because I just can’t keep my eyes open any more…
