I have had a tiresome evening trying to think of something interesting to write, to the accompaniment of Bowness And Windermere Bell Ringing Society having what must have been their first practice night for novice members getting tuned up for the wedding season.
The church is right next to the taxi rank and they have been enthusiastically noisy and tuneless for the last hour and a half. If it turns out that this entry is dull and uninspiring you are at liberty to write to them and complain.
I like church bells very much, but think their chimes should be floating musically across misty morning valleys from distant dreaming spires. There is a charming romance about the sound in those circumstances that is completely missing when they are dinging tiresomely and unrhythmically next to the taxi rank, drowning out all other sounds except for the Harley Davidson that Big John is tuning up in his workshop across the road. All in all it has not created an atmosphere conducive to creativity, and it may be that my Muse has irrevocably buzzed off to somewhere more restful, and I feel a bit regretful that I haven’t been able to do the same. However, I don’t wish to fail in my self-imposed duty of recording non-events in a quiet Cumbrian backwater, and so The Show Must Go On. Here is my catalogue of life experiences for the day…
Up until the church bells it was a fairly restful sort of a day. It was the first day of Lucy’s weekend exeat, so I have spent most of it driving over to York to get her.
This sounds as if it should be a tiresome way to spend a day, but actually it wasn’t at all. It was a jolly nice journey. I like doing it because it gives me plenty of opportunity to catch up on missed thinking time, and also to listen to Woman’s Hour. Today there was also a very interesting half hour feature about the psychology of authority in relation to the airline industry and its relevance to medicine, which was fascinating, and by the end of the journey I had that lovely smug feeling that you get when you have both achieved your aim and also managed to learn something new on the way, and thus turn into an All Round Improved Person, and I felt very pleased to note how middle class and intellectual I have become.
Lucy’s school is not at all like Oliver’s. The latter has a pleasant driveway up through trees which is littered with discarded sports jerseys and rugby balls. Lucy’s is stately and imposing, rather like the Downton Abbey house, with everybody’s sleek pony peacefully grazing in the emerald fields at one side of the drive, and the Yorkshire Gentlemen’s Cricket Ground next door on the other.
It is a brilliant place, perfect for storing your teenage girls, with an indoor and an outdoor swimming pool, and an oak panelled library, and a shiny new theatre and chapel at the back, and girls everywhere, with gleaming manes of long hair, and freckles and cut-glass accents. After several years behind its distinguished walls, Lucy finds my flat Northern vowels impossibly quaint and tries, without success, to mimic them, and then laughs a great deal.
She collapsed into the car underneath an enormous weight of books and folders and was exhausted and happy to see me, because it is the summer term and she is in the middle of her exams.
It is very nice to listen to her talking, which she did for most of the way home. She was in the middle of her revision for her maths exam, which she got out to do in the car and suggested that I might help. The difficulty is that as her schoolwork gets more complicated I have got less and less idea what on earth she is talking about. I have a vague recollection that I did once know how to calculate compound interest and what the function of a cosine is, but alas, those handy gems of information have long since faded from memory.
This has had the effect of creating a secret feeling that she may actually be very clever, and a mild anxiety that I might be something of an ignoramus. Unfortunately, I know that if ever she notices this then I will never hear the end of it, so I have got to make distantly interested and appreciative noises as she is telling me things, in order not to reveal that I haven’t got the slightest clue what she means.
It was after three when we finally got back. I had left Mark at home to carry on building the kitchen and also to take the dog for a haircut. The dog looks very appealing when he hasn’t had a haircut for ages, a bit like an animate teddy bear: but he is hot and uncomfortable as the weather warms up. By the time we got home he was short haired and tidy and looking rather like a dwarf Labrador again, which of course he isn’t, and very pleased with himself and even more pleased to see Lucy.
We had a hasty dinner together and then it was time for the taxi rank and the distracting bells.
I think this entry has been a bit muddled and disjointed but have got bored with trying to make it read more fluently, and so have given up.
You can blame the Church.
