It turns out that we didn’t miss anything on the taxi rank.
Nobody went anywhere and all of the taxi drivers spent their evening watching films on Netflix and reading the sport pages in the back of the Daily Mirror.
We were jolly glad we had decided to be idle, because in the end we had a happy sort of evening.
Mark came back from his night-time maths class and we thought that we would like to spend the night in Bowness.
This was because we see camper vans parked there all the time, and we wondered if the Lake District might be a nice place to be on holiday.
We went there and pretended to be tourists. We camped on the roadside by the lake, because we knew perfectly well that despite the signs about not doing, nobody would care in the least, which they didn’t.
As holidays go it was pleasant, but not very exciting, give me Blackpool any day.
Actually we spent the last of the evening drinking wine in the camper van and trying to understand negative numbers. I am sure that I must have understood these in my youth, but as my current relationship with the bank illustrates rather well, I am not very good at it now. Mark explained that two negatives make a positive, which I simply can’t quite make sense of. If I take five hundred pounds out of my overdraft not only do I not have five hundred pounds, I have got a lot of charges and a rude letter from the bank.
In the end he got on with it by himself and I read my book, which was from the library and turned out to be spectacularly rubbish. It was about a loony who kidnaps an astronaut, which sounded really promising on the dust cover, but just finished up in a lot of tedious dialogue about American healthcare funding. I shall take it back to the library tomorrow and tell them what I think.
We went back home reluctantly as usual, this morning, and Mark went off to fix things at the farm whilst I tried to organise being back at home with clean clothes and things to eat. This turned out not to be too difficult, because the lodger had done all the washing whilst we were away. This was jolly handy, so instead of dashing about too much I sat down and had a cup of coffee and listened to her stories about the things that we had missed.
Apart from a great deal of rain, the gutter coming loose and a mysterious plank of wood appearing in the garden, it turned out that we had not missed very much. Whilst we were away the junior lodger buzzed off back to be reconciled with her mother, having presumably got fed up of living on crisps at our house, and so we are a household of three again, which saves on ironing school uniforms.
The lodger seems to be making it her business to break every youthful heart in Bowness. Her telephone never stops dinging, and this week she has declined propositions from several Chinese gentlemen, an Indian and a couple of Romanians. She says that she does not want a boyfriend, but to be honest I think she is going to have to give in and get one soon just so that the rest of them go away and leave her in peace.
She buzzed off to work in the end, and I made a work picnic and then spent ages sitting at the computer trying to find flights for Number Two Daughter to come home at Christmas. I have found some, but they are so expensive that we might have to buy some lottery tickets first.
We haven’t won the lottery yet, so we came out to work.
It is raining again, and more rain is forecast, probably as a special arrangement for the weekend.
I do wish we could have some decent global warming, the sort that makes you warmer and not just wetter.
When we get really old and have got no more school fees we are going to take the camper van and drive to somewhere sunny for the winter.
Essex would do.
Have another picture of a holiday in the Lake District.
