We were woken up by the telephone ringing.
Admittedly it was lunchtime by the normal timekeeping habits of the world, it had rung off anyway by the time we worked out what the noise was, and answered it, so we had to call it back.
It was Ritalin Boy’s Other Grandma telling us that the visit she had planned to make with Ritalin Boy in the next half an hour would have to be cancelled, as all the roads to Windermere were closed because of the floods.
This did not surprise us in the least, because we had had some very exciting moments late last night, driving through water well above the sills of the taxis, at which time it had still been raining.
We had been late finishing, and tired, but we had survived with intact engines, which might have been rather more than I deserved, having carelessly hit a couple of unexpected floods at some over-enthusiastic speeds and had some surprising wet moments, at least one of which made me wish very much that I had not got the window open.
All in all we were not sorry to get home and safely to bed, especially as by then we were enjoying gale force winds as well, and every now and again the adventure was enhanced by branches crashing down into the roads, none of which hit us, to our great good fortune.
So we slept like very tired people until the phone rang. I told Mark about the cancelled visit and could hear him trying hard to sound disappointed. Instead of getting tidied up and waiting for visitors we thought we would go down to Bowness and look at the damage.
We abandoned the car on the taxi rank and went for a stroll. Things were bad, but not by a long chalk as bad as they can be sometimes. The lake was very full, probably, we decided, the wettest lake in the country, but not out across the road yet.
However, the thing which was immediately and very pleasingly apparent was that there was absolutely no point in going to work.
Quite apart from all the roads being closed, the boats were not running, indeed one of them appeared to be stranded in the garden of the PamperMe Beautiful Loveliness Health Spa, and their crews seemed to be fully occupied at the end of the largely submerged jetty, doing something which involved a great deal of hammering. We took some photographs and had a paddle, and then went home.
We had a whole Sunday afternoon in front of us then, unexpected free time with outside too wet to mend cars or do anything useful, and inside already tidy and clean: and so I am mildly embarrassed to tell you that we fell back on our usual stopgap when we have a few spare minutes, and went back to bed.
It was dark when we woke up. We had a second coffee-in-bed moment, and once we had emptied the dogs we decided to complete the day’s idleness by eating leftover curry in front of a DVD.
This is the second time in a fortnight that we have been so completely decadent, and it was lovely. We watched a brilliant film about the mathematician Alan Turing, which to our surprise and fascination had been partly filmed at Sherborne, which is the school where we would like to send Oliver if only he can get 55% at Common Entrance, make the rugby A team and learn to play the flute.
So it was an ace evening. It was an ace day, actually, rather splendid to have an enforced holiday.
There are some photographs below. The one of the umbrella is just to illustrate everybody’s misfortunes, there are inside-out umbrellas everywhere, as many abandoned umbrellas as there are over-excited ducks.
We are going back to bed. With any luck by tomorrow it will have started to drain away a bit and we can go back to work.
Then again, maybe it won’t.
