The above picture is my day’s efforts at the camper van.
The day started irritatingly slowly. We got out of bed especially early, and rushed off to collect some things that Mark needed from Kendal.
I thought that we ought to get some coffee and tea whilst we were there.
Collecting Mark’s things took until I lost my temper, which was not a cheering moment.
It was a morning of waiting impatiently whilst Mark, accompanied by various men in overalls at various oily garages, thoughtfully considered the merits of bolts without nuts and hoses that wouldn’t fit anything.
I do not much enjoy shopping even for interesting things, and I became very fed up indeed.
In the end I got cross.
I managed to control my crossness until after almost two hours of pondering he said cheerfully that he hadn’t got anything that he needed and that we would have to come back tomorrow.
There are some projects which do not require two people.
We will not both be coming back tomorrow.
I demanded to be taken to the tea and coffee shop without further delay. It is a lovely shop, and usually soothes my frame of mind enormously.
It smells of coffee, because the coffee beans come in fat wooden tubs and then are ground up to the size you like by a lady who digs them out with a brass scoop. There are uneven oak floors and creaking stairs and beautiful fragrant teas, and it is one of my nice places.
I did not wander around sniffing appreciatively and contemplating all the different varieties of tea before buying the one I usually get anyway. I had to hurry up because we had spent so long considering brake hoses.
This made me cross as well.
When we got back to the farm I was still cross. It took a cup of tea and some shortbread to restore me to tranquillity. Even then I had to concentrate hard on listening to the birds singing before I was truly able to banish the jangled feeling.
It was nice to be able to mix paint and concentrate on calm feelings. The picture is the back of the camper van, on which I have painted the Ibbetson family motto.
It is the real family motto, which must be right because of finding it on the sort of website that tells you your family crest. I don’t care if it isn’t anyway, because we liked it very much and decided that the Ibbetson family must be historically jolly all right sort of chaps.
It means “Live and die free,” which we thought was a splendid motto, and adopted it as our own immediately. We thought this was ace, how splendid to adopt a family motto to which we were really entitled, and nobody can be grumpy about you borrowing.
It is better to have written it in Latin because otherwise people will think that we are Hell’s Angels or something, which I don’t think the ancient Ibbetsons were, certainly the current ones aren’t. It sounds very much like the sort of thing that somebody might once have written in Tipp-Ex on the back of a leather jacket. If it is in Latin that adds an air of sophistication which will help with not getting barred from camp sites any more. This has happened to us once or twice already. We don’t mind this because of not liking camp sites, which tend to have a lot of rules and also cost at least twenty five quid a night.
We did not bother about the family crest, which has got dead sheep on it, due to the long Ibbetson farming tradition. If ever we meet the Queen I think I will ask her if we can change it. It is not pretty.
I have got to paint a dragon and an octopus on the back next. The children have asked for these. I will start on them tomorrow whilst Mark goes and hangs about garages in Kendal, discussing screw threads with people who think that they are interesting.
I will take a picture of the results for you.
