Ho, Ho, Ho

Sunday, and guilt got the better of me and I went out on to the taxi rank.

This had no benefit other than to make me feel virtuous, because Sunday is very uneventful at the end of November in the Lake District, and by teatime the only customer I had had was a fireman trying to get up to the fire station in a hurry because he had woken up to find that he had an emergency call out and his wife had pinched his car.

However it provided a peaceful interlude in which to drink tea and phone people and think about life, none of which I do much of when in the middle of family activities. Unfortunately it was so very cold that I sat with the engine running for quite a while, which did not help maximise profit margins much.

It has become very cold here now, everywhere was white and frozen this morning and the fells are still white.

There is a newspaper somewhere that has been making headlines on rubbish news days by telling everybody that we are going to have a very cold winter. I do not really believe them. Newspapers often say things like that, because ‘another mild and wet January expected this year’ makes a tedious headline unless you can liven it up a bit with some terrifying global warming threat to follow, like ‘so thousands are expected to drown in North of England Puddle Crisis Shocker’.

All the same I would like a good cold winter, preferably with snow, especially at Christmas and so keep secretly hoping that they have not just made it up. I keep getting a little tingle of snow-related excitement as the temperature falls and letting my imagination fill in the mild chill with ten foot drifts freezing into ice walls and all of normal life suspended until spring. I think this would be brilliant.

I can cheerfully think it is brilliant, because Mark worries a good deal about being ready for winter, and so we have got a lot of wood cut at the farm ready to use. Every now and again he brings some home in the back of his taxi, which means that he has filled his socks up with sawdust and will walk it all over the carpet.

He is talking now about priming up the generator in case of power cuts, and hunting out the snow chains for the camper van. This is because when he was a child his family lived in some dreadful primitive rural nightmare without electricity or telephones or even a road to it, and you had got to dig out your own coal and load it on a donkey cart, or something of that ilk.

He tells us about it sometimes, and I think it sounds ghastly, and the children, who have had a relatively sheltered life, frankly don’t believe him. Either way it has worked in our favour because now that he is grown up he is quite determined that we will at all times be warm and comfortable and have somewhere to plug in the iPad chargers: a policy with which I am in wholehearted agreement.

I am doing my bit in getting ready for the winter by making Christmas cards for people. Mark stayed at home today because I had borrowed his taxi, and in between mending somebody else’s car, which wouldn’t start, he made me some stamps for printing designs on things.

I was very excited about this, because it is lovely to make things that look as nice as real ones that you can buy in shops, and as soon as I got home obviously I did some more Christmas card manufacture, whilst Mark sat on the floor next to me and looked for cheap engine lifts on eBay on his computer.

By the time I had finished we were both covered in glitter, and so were the dogs, and it took absolutely ages to get the ink off the desk where I had accidentally stamped: “Ho, Ho, Ho” on it in a distracted moment, but I am making satisfactory progress and Mark has bought an engine crane which he says will come in handy for all sorts of things and we can always pay for it on his credit card, which fortunately we re-ordered after he cut it up a couple of weeks ago in a moment of negativity.

I am mildly anxious about this because it is getting closer to Christmas, and I find his credit card very useful for all sorts of things, but it is still working, and so no need to panic yet.

In any case, we have got lots of wood in and have almost finished making our Christmas cards already.