I haven’t done very much of note to report to you today.
Of course it is Saturday, and all interesting activities have got to be curtailed by the necessity of school-fee accumulation, so once I have updated you on the basic and not very thrilling details I shall probably leave you in peace and drink my tea instead.
It is quite difficult to write anything interesting when we are busy, because of being interrupted a lot. I can think of brilliantly inspired things to write just as somebody bounds up to the taxi and says how sorry they are that they aren’t going very far: and it is all lost for ever, vanished back into the creative mist.
Also I have been feeling tired and grumpy, with a bud of a headache slowly beginning to turn into a scarlet blossom just behind my eyes. There is no great reason for this, except probably the eternal nuisances of not enough sleep and too many of the wrong sort of hormones. This is not the best frame of mind for doing creative things, so very soon I am going to put away all efforts at composition, and drink tea and read quietly instead. This feels like a very alluring prospect, and I don’t mind telling you that I am looking forward to it.
It rained dreadfully at the start of the day. I don’t mind rain, especially when it isn’t cold and windy, but somehow this morning the world seemed grey and sodden, and wearily dispiriting to wake up to.
By the afternoon the clouds had melted away, and everything was suddenly vividly different, flooded in the glorious golden warmth of a happy July, and things felt better.
Mark went off to the farm to fix my taxi, which had developed an alarmingly squeaky sound. This had become so loud by the end of last night that I could hardly hear what my customers were saying, not that this mattered a great deal. There is not much sensible conversation to be had at half past three in the morning from people who have been in the pub since teatime.
I milled around in the kitchen and garden, drinking tea and getting things ready for work. Lucy finished work at the florist for the weekend, and came to sit companionably beside me to tell me about weddings and funerals and people in love. She does not have to work tomorrow, and was glowing with the tired happiness of having earned lots of cash and now being able to collapse into pyjamas and idleness.
I made sandwiches and flasks of spicy chai and listened to her, it is brilliant to have another little window in to the world. I had never thought about what a nuisance gypsophilia is to try and sort out into stems, as if there was some sort of florist’s genius that saved them this sort of difficulty. Lucy thinks that when she gets married she will not have flowers at all, but perhaps an arrangement of chocolates, which sounds far less trouble and much more fun.
I am in agreement on this point. As I have mentioned before, when I got married the thing that I entirely forgot to sort out was getting transport to the church, having thought that I could probably just walk. Elspeth’s husband had to fill in as an emergency measure.
Like plumbers with dripping taps.
That’s enough writing. Chai and the autobiography of a 747 pilot for me.
See you tomorrow.
