It has become very cold.
I think I rather like this. Tonight it is sharp and still and clear. The stars are tiny and brilliant, and the air on the taxi rank is biting my nose.
This is a huge improvement on the dreary damp grey which seems to have enveloped Windermere for weeks. Today the sky has been fresh and bright, and all of my washing dried to a pleasantly scented crisp on the line in the back garden.
I do not mind the cold at all. I have am wearing my sheepskin boots and woollen socks, and to my great joy, I have got a new jumper.
It is a real new jumper, with labels, not just the sort bought from eBay. I bought it in an extravagantly impulsive moment in TK Maxx when buying socks the other week, and have hidden it from myself in guilty unease ever since.
It was so cold in the garden when I brought the washing in tonight that I took it down from the shelf anyway, and put it on to wear for work, which indoors was rather like having a sudden middle-aged-lady moment, but out here, in the night, it is perfect. It is thick and warm and soft, with a heavy roll collar that is gorgeously sheltering my neck from drafts. I am feeling comfortably pleased with myself, and hardly guilty at all.
Mark lit the fire, because there might be a frost tonight. He has spent the day mending my taxi, which sounds a bit excessive merely for a broken fan belt, but he has also replaced a pulley and fixed the rubbish handbrake, so that I can stop on hills again. He has refilled the oil and water, and I know myself to be a Cherished Motorist.
I have spent the day doing house things. The difficulty with having kindly bought bones for the dogs, which they adore with a passion, is that the floor of the house is now scattered with crunched-up bone fragments, a bit like having your carpets covered with smelly, jagged Lego, only stickier and more camouflaged.
The dogs have liked the bones very much. We had a disagreement with Roger Poopy yesterday when he did not wish to leave his on the floor to join us on the bed for morning coffee. He agonised over this decision for ages, until eventually sociability got the better of him, and he abandoned the bone to jump up onto the dog-towel with which we cover the quilt in the mornings. His father immediately dived on the bone, to Roger Poopy’s distress, and gnawed it in noisy and indifferent solitude on the floor.
When the dogs left for the farm this morning I got the hoover out and resolved the bone problem for the immediate future. This was an overdue activity anyway. There seemed to be crumbs and bits of firewood everywhere, and underneath the kitchen table was a small model of the Eiffel Tower, bought in a tat-acquisitive moment, that I knew perfectly well had been lying there for at least a week, and had been ignoring because of being too idle to bend over.
In fact it was not bought, but given to us as a complementary supplement to a much larger, coloured flashing-light version, which you will not be surprised to hear that I rather like and keep on my dressing table.
I threw the little one away, on the grounds that it was very clearly unloved, and felt smugly pleased with myself for being the sort of person who can declutter without hesitation.
It was nice to have clean carpets and outdoor-scented laundry, I can be at peace with myself in the certain knowledge that I must be a Good Person.
I came out to work in the end.
I took the picture standing next to my taxi on the taxi rank this evening. Looking at the picture as I added it in to here it struck me for the first time ever that I spend all of my evenings sitting at the side of an ancient village graveyard, frequently alone into the small hours of the morning.
What a disappointingly untroubling experience this has turned out to be. I have been so thoroughly not haunted that I have only ever thought of the graveyard as a place that intoxicated customers use as a repository for urine and secreted bottles of alcohol.
I have got all the supernatural sensitivity of a gatepost.
However I do have a splendidly warm jumper.
