We got home last night to a terrible disaster.
Number Two Daughter had had a jolly evening with her friends celebrating her brilliant new appointment teaching skiing at a place in Canada called Big White, rolled home late and happily intoxicated and forgot to let the dogs out.
When we got home both dogs had had awful accidents on the floor and were hiding upstairs, in fact my dog had been somehow shut in Lucy’s bedroom, where he had coped with his guilt by making himself a comfortable nest in her bed and dribbling happily.
It took ages to clean it all up, and it was almost six o’clock before we eventually got into bed, feeling tired and unreasonably grumpy. It is not fair to be grumpy, because they are not Number Two Daughter’s dogs, and not really her responsibility, the problem is that they are so used to the pattern of somebody-arrives-home-and-then-we-go-out that it is now a bit like turning on a tap.
We went to bed thinking sadly about how awful the house felt. It is not nice to come home to a house full of guilt and horrible smelling accidents.
However, to our great good fortune the weather was still gorgeously warm, so we could just open all of the doors and windows and hope that by morning everywhere would have aired through a bit.
Of course it had, but when we got up this morning we thought that everywhere felt stale and dusty and full of guilty dogs and dark winter. We had got a couple of hours before we had got to go to work, so we thought that we would make things feel better and clean up.
We went to the Co-op for some more polish, then we set to.
We threw every door and window in the whole house open as wide as it would go. Then we polished the rocking chairs and the grandfather clock until they shone. We cleaned the windows and the mirrors until they gleamed. We pulled the tired tablecloths off and put them in the wash and replaced them with fresh ones.
We refilled the fruit bowls and gave the flowers fresh water. We scrubbed the hearth and swept the stairs, and stood on chairs and flicked the cobwebs away from the corners of the ceiling. We wiped away fingerprints and sticky patches and unidentifiable smears, and Mark shook billowing clouds of dust out of the rugs into the garden.
We washed our sheets, and Lucy’s dog-dribbly sheets, and pegged them on the line to dry.
When we had finished I looked around and felt very pleased indeed, it looked beautiful, neat and well-cared-for and pretty, and I had the sort of lovely glow that you get when you look at something in your life and think how very nice it is.
Mark said that he will have to get some paint and repaint the ceilings, which will be splendid, and probably less messy than if I try to do it. He took the dogs for another precautionary walk whilst I got our picnic ready, we had sushi, because the sun was shining, and it was gorgeous.
We sat on the taxi rank thinking how glorious the summer is. The bluebells are out, masses of them underneath the trees, and their heavenly scent is drifting everywhere, there is no more beautiful time to be here in the Lake District.
I am so busy looking at things that I am finding it difficult to drive, although fortunately there are a lot of tourists here who are driving really slowly, which is making it a bit easier. It is the loveliest time.
I am on the taxi rank now, listening to the happy hum of people talking, sitting contentedly outside pubs and bistros and restaurants. Overhead the swallows are whirling and crying their beautiful summertime cry. The sun is slowly sinking behind the Langdales, the air is cooling and the intense blue of the sky is beginning the slow fade to grey.
I think after all I am glad that I didn’t pay enough attention at school to do something clever like working in a bank.
There are worse ways to earn a living.
