We have had a rather wearisome start to the evening.
There was an enormous accident on the main road which goes from Kendal – and hence the motorway – into the Lake District, into Windermere and Ambleside and Grasmere.
It was messy and unpleasant enough completely to close the road. After that, all of the cars which would normally have used it; all the cars which were full of already slightly lost hopeful holidaymakers; all of those cars were rerouted along the back roads through Bowness.
It is impossible to describe the resulting gridlock.
It is a weekend in the middle of August and thousands and thousands of cars had poured into the Lake District, only to be stopped and diverted off along winding single track roads. Some of these are not wide enough to allow two cars to pass one another. Even the bigger roads, which are more easily navigable, were blocked along their whole length with lines and lines of weary-looking motorists.
I did a couple of jobs before concluding that every ten minute journey was taking me roughly an hour, even with all of my best taxi-driver shortcuts, and retreated back home to drink coffee and wait for it to clear: which of course it all did in the end.
Most of my customers so far this evening had been stuck in it. Once they finally arrived they wandered around in a bleary-eyed state of befuddlement until they had drunk themselves into recovery and something approaching calmness of temper. Most of them had been sitting in traffic for between five and six hours, and never wanted to get into their car again.
I sympathised with the last point of view, rather profoundly after my own experiences trying to navigate my own way around the muddy back lanes of Windermere.
In fact it was all thoroughly tiresome, and I was obliged to remind myself several times that however awful it is to be stuck in a traffic jam, it is presumably considerably more awful to be dead, and therefore at least I was having a better day than some poor motorist who had probably set off cheerfully enough in the morning but then never came back home. Compared to that my day was brilliant really.
It had got off to a rather late start, as is usual on a Saturday, and mostly it just seems to have had an awful lot of puppies in it.
They spend their nights shut in the front hall, and squeak to get out when they need a wee in the morning. Mark has hit on the magnificent idea of putting a couple of sheets of cardboard in front of their door before he opens it, and now they all cascade out hastily and wee on the cardboard, which has saved our carpets magnificently. After that they charge about the bedroom chewing things and wrestling one another and making a racket, but at least the problem of the leaks is mostly resolved.
I put their basket in the garden this morning, in the hope that they might pop into it for their morning nap, and then wee in the garden when they woke up, but I am sorry to say that it didn’t work. they charged about and rolled around and pestered the grown-up dogs and bit everybody’s toes until we were beginning to behave like a meeting of Tourette’s Syndrome sufferers.
Then, as they always do, with one accord they all fell asleep at exactly the same moment, not in the sunny garden, but in the place where they thought their basket ought to be. After that they had to be hastily grabbed when they woke up and escorted outside. It is a very complicated thing, supervising eight puppies, I can tell you. Their mother just licks it up if she catches them having an accident. I am very glad that this does not form part of a human mother’s duties.
They are very happy little souls. It is a great pleasure to watch them even if they do leak. I won’t exactly be sorry when they have all grown up and left home, but I suppose I will miss them.
Isn’t it just like having children?
