The sun was shining benignly this morning, and we had got lots of post-weekend things to do.
Windermere is always busy on Mondays, because everybody is out at work during the weekends. Today the village was full of people popping into the post office and the chemist’s, and depositing their weekend takings in the bank, wandering about in the sunshine and waving at their neighbours.
We did all of these things, and we popped into the ironmonger and collected Oliver’s tweed jacket from the dry cleaner into the bargain. I was glad I had remembered to do this, it is always a little anxiety. There have been moments in the past when I have completely forgotten about school uniform at the cleaner’s, and they have had to go to school in their PE kit on the first day of term. I agreed with them that this was ghastly irresponsible parenting, but was powerless to mend the situation.
In any case the problem is now effectively halved, because Lucy will never wear school uniform ever again, except possibly for fun when she is quite a lot older, and I will never know about that, still less be responsible for collecting it from the cleaner.
When we got back Mark took my car over to the farm to do some further dreadful-noise fixing. He had fixed the last dreadful noise by replacing a part which I think may have been called a crank pulley with an old one he had got lying about, but the old one was almost as bad, which was of course why he took it out in the first place.
It did a splendid job of getting me through the weekend, however, which was all that mattered. Today was Monday, and the Autoparts van was about, so the new crank pulley arrived and Mark buzzed off to the farm to fix it.
I did not go to the farm. I stayed at home virtuously and pegged washing out in the warm, mint-and-fennel scented garden. Then I made some coffee chocolates and some cheese and onion pies.
It is ages since I have made pastry, so long, in fact, that I still had lots of rich white goose fat left over from Christmas. This makes ace pastry, and I mixed it with mustard and paprika and vegetable stock and a couple of eggs, just to make sure that it wasn’t dull.
After that I went to Kendal.
You might remember that a couple of weeks ago we had a taxi emergency when we discovered to our horror that the licence plate had run out, and we had to get it replaced in an unseemly rush.
The sequel to that story was that after all of that fuss we forgot to collect the new plate from the council when it was ready three days later.
We realised this at the weekend, when another taxi driver crossly told us that the plate which was still on the back of Mark’s taxi had expired ages ago, and we didn’t ought to be out, not without proper plates on, like.
Of course we had been so pleased to have resolved our crisis that we had forgotten about it completely, and it was a jolly good job that the other driver had been grumpy, because otherwise it could have been months.
Mark stuck the plate on, and I went home.
I spent the rest of the day wrestling dispiritedly with last year’s accounts. Actually, really I mean last year’s receipts, because I do not seem to have been interested enough to have kept detailed accounts, there is a vague list of cash spent on fuel, some bank statements and an IOU in the box where we save up to pay tax.
I am not going to do this again tomorrow. I have cleared almost all of the things that I was feeling guilty about. The house is clean, relative to what it was anyway, we have got food in the cupboards and I have made a jolly good start on my paperwork. I know myself now to be a person of unquestionable virtue, and can go back and draw pictures on the camper van tomorrow with a clear conscience.
The pictures are of the field we are buying. It is the most wonderful field in the world.
Just so you know.
