It is quiet without Lucy.
For somebody who spends her entire life asleep or plugged into her computer she is a very noticeable presence in the house, and her absence is causing something of a hush.
It has rained today, which has been rather lovely: a warm, heavy, drifting rain, making the air thick with the heavy green scent of damp soil and leaves, and the mist cling to our hair and clothes when we went for our morning excursion round the Library Gardens. Everywhere was muffled, and still, I felt as though I could practically hear things growing and unfurling, and the garden has exploded with green. When we got home there were lots of little drops of water in our hair, and we shook ourselves, like the dogs.
Oliver stayed in when we walked the dogs. It is too wet for his trampoline, Harry has gone back to school, and he and Mark are not going back to the farm until tomorrow, so he has barricaded himself in his bedroom with a mug of apple juice and a plateful of sausage sandwiches, presumably to massacre zombies and look at pictures of undressed girls on his computer.
We went down to the taxi rank. Mark spent most of the day engrossed in his own computer, he is investigating plumbing fittings with which to construct his explosive petrol economy device. I have written to Number Two Daughter, in order to interfere in her eventful and intriguing emotional life, and am trying hard to maintain interest in Lucy’s book about vampires, although sadly without much success. I am having to resist the temptation to skip out chunks of it, but she will be disappointed if I don’t read it properly, so I am persevering. It may be that she feels the same about Pride and Prejudice, of course.
Thus I have been a bit without gainful occupation, since it is Monday and most of the weekend tourists have gone home, and the weather forecast is not brilliant so nobody else has turned up to replace them.
I went for a swim in the early evening. We can’t both go, as one of us has got to be around for Oliver, and Mark has spent all of the last week shoving wheelbarrows full of stones about the farm and hence is reasonably exercised and has plenty of aches and pains to grumble about and feel secretly proud of. I have been sedentary and so was feeling horribly flobbery, and laid claim to being the person most in need of exercise and rehabilitation.
The thing about driving a taxi is that although it provides lots of wonderful opportunities for reading library books, writing letters and milling about the Lake District in the sunshine, it also provides a wonderful opportunity to metamorphosise into a degenerate blob of lard. After twenty years of it I think I would not be a beautiful sight at a naked skipping club.
Therefore I am currently attempting to maintain at least a nodding acquaintance with the sound of my beating heart before it is completely smothered in its greasy yellow overcoat, and try and swim at least half a mile every day, except weekends which have got too many taxis in them. I have not been terribly successful with this goal since the children came home, and am attempting a reorganisation of my timetable so that I spend less of my day eating biscuits and more of it striking out energetically up and down the swimming pool.
I felt lots better afterwards, and resolved that I would eat less as well, thus completing the picture of a slightly less well-rounded individual, but by the time it got to midnight I was absolutely ravenous, and had to dive into the house to raid the tub of peanuts. These sustained me for the rest of the evening. It is such a tiresome thing that living off one’s fat is so uncomfortable, it would be so much pleasanter if I could just carry on smoothly without all sorts of uncomfortable internal grumblings and discomforts, cars don’t seem to feel unhappy when they get down to the reserve fuel tank.
We finished the day with a late-night dog emptying stroll which is no good for burning up fat but rather lovely for breathing in deeply and feeling joyful about the smell of damp blossoms. The dogs charged about and we ambled peacefully and felt happy and thought of Lucy having adventures on the other side of the sea.
It had stopped raining by then. It is a beautiful world.
