Winter has arrived today.
High winds last night tore almost all of the beautiful golden leaves from the trees, leaving stark bare branches and a russet carpet.
It is suddenly, piercingly cold. The skies have been clear and bitter-blue, and there is an ice wind.
I love the winter dark in the Lakes, the yawning expanses of grim night, and the distant little patches of light which mean people, and hearthstones, and safety. I love that the same shimmering lakes where we swam with the children on the hot days last summer have now become deathly cold and dark and dangerous, it is a shifting world.
It is not easy to be at work, because my atavistic self would much prefer to crawl back into my safe cave and eat honey and nuts there until springtime, there is a primitive feeling of being very exposed under the vast night sky. It is vaguely disappointing to be firmly in the twenty first century without any real life-or-death need for fire to keep sabre-toothed mammoths at bay.
Despite this I am, of course, at work. It has been a busy evening because of bonfires and everybody thinking very sensibly that it is far too cold to walk back to their hotel.
Of course being Saturday the whole day has mostly been about preparation for the evening at work, except that some friends called in this afternoon, which was nice. We had loafed about in bed until the last possible minute and then had to get ourselves organised, meaning picnics and car cleaning.
We had just about finished when our friends rang. They are visiting the Lakes and we haven’t seen them for ages, so without the smallest regret we encouraged them to come round and drink coffee instead of responsibly going off to work.
This was a happy event, and got the working day off to a good, if rather late, beginning, with lots of warm feelings to start us off: except that a large coffee just before getting into the taxi meant that I had to pop back home several times during the early evening for what the Americans gloriously and accurately refer to as comfort stops.
This is a good thing anyway, because it means that I can chuck the dogs out into the garden for their own comfort stop now that it has become too cold to leave the door open. Roger Poopy has got all of the bodily self control that you might expect from a four-month-old poopy, and he is very ashamed of himself when he has an accident.
I didn’t really get time to switch my computer on before work, and when I got there it was full of pictures of Number Two Daughter, who has finally managed to reach her splendid new camper van.
She sent me a series of ecstatic texts and some pictures of a rusty old bus. I understood completely. Having a camper van is a bit like having children, in that no matter how awfully ugly and uninspiring it is in the eyes of the rest of the world, to its owners it is a thing of joy and unending beauty. Also they cost a fortune to look after, and every now and again things go terribly wrong requiring soul searching and family conferences.
Number Two Daughter is in the first joyful throes of new-camper-van parenthood, she sent me delighted pictures of the spice rack and the marvellous shelves in the bathroom, requiring that I admire them fulsomely, which of course I did. Suggestions that it might need a bit of paint were met by indignant statements of its perfect perfection, with which I hurriedly agreed.
Of course it is the most fantastic thing, how wonderful to be young and in Canada with your own mobile house. It is her first very own home, and I can’t help but wish that we could go and see it and admire it as it deserves: also so that Mark could help with the rust a bit.
She is a grown up and will be fine.
Maybe we will manage it one day.
