Look how white it is!

I have just discovered that my English teacher, from whom I learned critical thinking, partly from his very critical marking, woe betide the juvenile authors of tedious drivel: and whom I was perfectly certain was approaching a hundred years old when I was eleven, has just had his seventy first birthday, making him not an old gidget at all, but only twenty years older than I am.

I have been entirely astonished by this discovery, but of course when I look back it is perfectly plain that in fact he was not elderly and decrepit at all, but in the full flush of energetic youth.

He would have been in his mid-thirties when he taught us, which from my current standpoint is barely old enough to have left school. Numbers One and Two Daughters, who are both almost thirty, are not old enough to be left in charge of the dogs for a weekend, never mind the literary fates of an entire school full of students.

I was no great fan of school, it is very nice to be grown up and not have to go any more, nevertheless I would very much like still to be attending his English classes, which were interesting then and would be interesting now: should he decide to commence teaching some adult literacy classes I would cheerfully put my name down. How splendid it would be to have somebody generously read Roald Dahl stories to me these days, and invent the beginning of a convoluted murder mystery in order for me to create my own conclusion.

In fact I am trying to spend some time every day writing. There are seven hundred words to be written to you, and four hundred of my Novel-To-Be which is going nowhere very slowly indeed, it is much easier to come up with yards of undemanding prose when all I am doing is twittering about the washing. I am quite sure that it can’t be all that difficult: after all, Jeffrey Archer has managed it, but nevertheless a great deal of head scratching and tongue-sticking-out effort is being invested in it.

Talking of the washing, those of you who have found this page by typing Windermere Diaries into Google will be able to see the picture which is otherwise concealed from Facebook readers. You will be able to see the glorious blue whiteness of my new-laundry-soap washing, which did not go horribly blue after all,  and as a bonus also dried in the garden in the sunshine in a matter of a couple of hours, how magnificent the summer is.

It was so warm that I watered the garden and planted some of the lupins that I grew from seed last year, and put some slug pellets down. I don’t at all like doing this because of feeling so terribly guilty about the poor slugs, who after all are only doing their little sluggy thing. The thing is that they have eaten off the tops of all of the sweet pea seeds that I planted a couple of weeks ago, which was not a great way of showing their gratitude at not having been killed so far.

My delphiniums are just starting to appear now, the first little leaves have just poked through, and I think having mass murder on my conscience is not too high a price to pay for their towering azure beauty in a couple of months when they have reached their full splendour.

It has been a lovely summer day. I hung out the washing and pottered in the garden and ate some homemade fudge and wrote a bit of my novel and made some new curtains for the camper van, which Mark is busily fixing back together at the farm. Then I remembered at about five o’clock that I had forgotten to wash the breakfast pots or get any dinner ready for tonight, and rang Mark and suggested that we have the night off.

This is not quite as lazy as it sounds, last night we made just less than forty pounds between us, which is spectacularly rubbish, and it won’t get any better until tomorrow, so we might as well enjoy being idle tonight. We have got plenty of good French red wine, and when Mark gets home we are going to cook prawns in sesame oil and then loaf about getting intoxicated and giggly.

I love the summer.

LATER NOTE: We couldn’t remember how to switch the TV on. In the end we were rolling on the floor laughing at our technical incompetence and discovered a small but clearly significant switch labelled POWER which did the trick. We put it on and looked at Amazon and without actually realising what I was doing somehow I accidentally bought Season Six of Downton Abbey. This turned out to be not a mistake in the least, within fifteen minutes we were totally immersed in Julian Fellowes’ utterly captivating yarn about the way the nineteen twenties jolly well should have been, we love it.

We cooked something that we found in a tub in the freezer, of which I had no recollection whatsoever, but which turned out to be an absolutely inspired combination of rice and pecan nuts and bacon and something brown, which was excellent with the prawns.

We drank three glasses of wine each and got intoxicated and giggly. Mark was so drunk that he was a nuisance whilst I was having a shower and just laughed when I was cross about it.

It has been the most brilliant night off. I would love another one next week.

Number Two Daughter has not got her CRB check yet. She is not at all happy.