The thing about today was that it was the middle day: that is, the day in between coming back yesterday and setting off tomorrow.
This has led to an enormous amount of terribly busy flapping about.
It didn’t start with flapping about, in fact it started off with a trip across the road to Windermere’s newly installed Christmas Market.
Windermere Town Council, in their wisdom, have closed off the road in and out of Windermere, diverted the traffic into a standstill, and bedecked the road with lots of jolly seasonal market stalls instead.
Of course we couldn’t possibly ignore that. It is only on for two days by way of a trial, presumably to see if the police will put up with it or all hand in their transfer request for Brixton to get away from the exhaust fumes. There were an awfully lot of grumpy motorists. We waved cheerily to a taxi driver who was stuck in the queue but he just made some unfriendly taxi-driver hand signals in return.
It was absolutely packed with people, possibly the busiest I have ever seen Windermere. One of our neighbours was dressed up as an elf and was flogging off mulled wine on the pavement, the rest of our neighbours appeared to be drinking it.
We refrained, having already learned the lesson about mulled wine for breakfast this week, and wandered up and down the assembled files of stalls with great interest. They were rather precariously anchored on the steep hill just below the station, and smelled festively of roasting pork and woodsmoke cooking and mulled wine, much to our unbreakfasted happiness.
In the end we did not buy roast pork and crepes, but went back home where I cooked pancakes instead, some with smoked cheese and some with maple syrup, and they were a splendid start to the day. Mark went out to work then, whilst Lucy and I got on with domestic adventures.
We were making Christmas cards. This has been a joint effort, if you happen to get one then the tasteful bits in delicate colour are Lucy’s. Anything that is vulgar and smudged is the product of my own fair hand. They are a limited edition, because I ran out of ink, and so some of our friends will be getting blurry faint ones, but if I send those to the friends who drink a lot anyway they might not even notice.
After that I baked carrot cake and cherry shortbread, to make sure that nobody starves to death in the winter chill. It certainly won’t be Mark, who came in to visit the loo and took six pieces of hot crumbly shortbread back out to work with him.
I ironed and packed things for tomorrow. We had just got to the end of the day and everybody home and drinking wine when Number One Daughter rang. She did something called a Face Time Call, which is where the other person appears on your telephone in person as they are talking, you can really see them and they can see you.
I have not done this before and was overwhelmed with the wonderfulness of the event, what a brilliant fantastic world we live in. We could see her, and Number One Son-In-Law and their two happy poopies as if they were in the room with us. I could never have imagined such a thing to be real in my childhood, what an amazingly clever thing that somebody has invented.
It was misfortunate that by the time they called I had got an alcoholically red nose and cake smudges on my apron. It might be kind to pre-warn people that you are going to look at them whilst they are on the telephone, then they have got the choice of putting something over their unappealing bits first.
The day has drawn to an end. Mark is cleaning our shoes for tomorrow and we are starting to get ready for bed.
It is the candle-lit carol service in the Cathedral tomorrow.
I am excited already.
