We were very tempted not to come to work tonight.
Having now been sitting here on the taxi rank for several unemployed hours I wish we had given in to temptation. I could have been at home with a large glass of French red and a warm fire.
The predicted bad weather has turned up, and Windermere is wet and windy. I don’t mind this especially, because I have barely noticed the real weather because of it snowing in my book, which is a great deal more exciting.
In fact the real weather did not come to my attention at all until Mark returned from the farm with the dogs this evening. Exhausted dogs who have spent the day charging about in the rain through piles of assorted mud and dung are not brilliant house guests. What they most want to do is sleep, and where they would most like to do it is somebody else’s bed.
We barricaded the bedroom doors and persuaded Lucy to bath them once we had gone to work, which she bravely agreed to do. Mark showed me some pictures of his day’s efforts, one of which I have included above.
It is some bits of the camper van. I don’t have the first idea what they are, only that they are something important and structural which he has restored from a state of disintegrated rustiness and which will come in very useful when he finally puts it all back together. He was very pleased with them, and since I didn’t have any pictures of my day, which has been mostly book and cooking, I have put them on the top of the page for you to admire.
I had my first customer at that point. He was a foreigner who wanted to go to the big watch on the hill. It took me some time to work out that he meant the Baddeley Clock.
I have spent the day carefully revising the first two chapters of my Magnum Opus. When you are trying to persuade an agent to buy your book you have got to send them the first couple of chapters and a synopsis, so it is very important that the first bit is right. I can revise all of the rest of it whilst I am waiting for an agent to send me a rejection letter, they all warn that you have got to wait about eight weeks until they get round to doing that, but the start has got to be perfect.
This is a bit hopeful since I haven’t even finished it yet, and especially since I am having paranoia about the current chapter anyway, which is just not writing itself the way I would like. In the end I gave up on it and went downstairs to cook chicken in wine and Greek yoghurt to shove in picnics.
Lucy’s book is about a teenage girl whose mother, father and little brother all get kidnapped by demons. I think this sounds like a good plot, although possibly rather uncomfortably close to home. Certainly compared to invading York, or Lancaster, or indeed anywhere with actual maps and landscape it sounds like a breeze. I seem to have spent rather a lot of time looking at satellite pictures of the A7 lately.
I was distracted at that point.
It was only midnight, but some customers got in and on our way round the corner to not very far away, the air blower on the heater broke. This made my car unusable because of the rain and cloudy windows, so we went home and had a glass of wine instead.
This was lovely.
I am intoxicated now, and we are going to have an early night.
See you tomorrow
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