I woke up this morning to the happy news that the Windermere Diaries Appreciation Society has, in fact, preserved a copy of every single page of the diaries since their commencement, and that by a miraculous chance of fate, February is not lost into the cyber ether, but safely archived in a ring binder under the desk.
I was very pleased indeed by this development, and more so when the Society’s Chief Executive Officer volunteered to spend half of his busy morning copying and emailing them to me. Of course I accepted, what else are parents for?
As a result I am now in possession of my magnum opus in its entirety, and when I have managed to get it tidily reordered I shall put the rediscovered month as a sort of appendix somewhere.
Much as I would have liked to spend the day tiddling contentedly about on the computer reorganising diary pages, of course I didn’t.
Today is, as you know, our busy working day.
On Saturday we are supposed to start as early as we can and finish late. This would probably happen more efficiently if we got up earlier and were more organised, I have mentioned before that I have got no idea how people manage to get themselves out to work by nine o’clock in the morning, we were supposed to be starting at three today but despite running round frantically with an eye on the clock you will not be surprised to hear that we were still almost an hour late.
Even though it is only February it is astonishingly busy here, which is fortunate, because we have spent all of our money on school fees and new Barbour jackets and gadding about visiting hotels, so it is a jolly good job that lots of people have decided to come to the Lake District for a bracing mid-winter break.
There isn’t really time on Saturdays to do anything much that isn’t about work. We loaf about in bed drinking coffee for as long as we possibly can, and then we get ready and then we go. We work until absolutely everybody has stopped wandering about anywhere in the Lake District and then we feel self-congratulatory or dejected and go back to bed.
Mark popped round to the shops to buy olives to put in picnics, and milk to put in the enormous cups of coffee that we need to steam our eyes open in the mornings, and I washed the pots and tidied up, and did lots of little jobs like chopping basil to mix into the jar of olive oil.
We have recently acquired a pair of fat little flasks for taking hot food to work, which is a brilliant improvement to life. We do most of our eating at work, especially at weekends, and have eaten every possible variation on sandwiches including fried, baked and yesterday’s. We have had wraps and panini and prawn toast and pizza, and I have long ago run out of ways of making ham seem interesting and appealing.
Hence over the last couple of days we have created a large pan of rich tomato and beetroot soup, made with all sorts of vegetables and liquidised with and it has been ace. One of the features of taxi driving is that if you are not careful it is very easy to live on a complete diet of pasties from Gregg’s, chocolate and crisps, balanced at the end of the night by a burger and a couple of left-over sausages from the van that parks outside the night club.
We have done this in desperate times in the past, and it is quite satisfying in a greasy, salty sort of way, but I can tell you from experience that this lifestyle selection will make a person very round in next to no time.
I think that I would probably rather not to be too round, and so the addition of vegetables into my diet is very welcome indeed. I have made the soup properly filling by adding a carton of cream and some satisfyingly full-fat milk.
Mark cleaned the taxis out whilst I cut crusty bread into thick buttery fingers of a handy size for dipping into flasks. I whipped together honey and yoghurt and cream cheese and poured it over home made glazed-with-brown-sugar carrot and brandy cakes for pudding, and filled some tubs with sliced melon and cherries, and some others with olives and cheese. I added a bag of jelly babies to make sure we had got a complete variety of fruits, and a bag of nuts for absent-minded snacking moments.
It is all so very wholesome.
I can’t understand why I’m not losing weight.
