It is terribly cold.
The skies are white-blue, and sharp, and the chill seeps into your bones. There is a frost-edged wind, and just walking round the Library Gardens with the dogs made the front of my head hurt, like being nine years old and having your first attempt at eating ice cream with new front teeth.
Mark went to work in his thermal underwear and heavy duty shirt and moleskins, and heavy hurricane-proof overalls on top of those, with a woolly hat and scarf. His boots leak a bit, but it doesn’t matter at the moment because everything is frozen hard.
He was almost too swaddled to walk when he set off, but when he came back home this evening he was still cold.
I was more glad than I can say not to be going out to work, but he didn’t seem to mind. When he is not doing maths he is spending every spare moment squinting at his computer with his tongue sticking out, trying to understand how the internet works.
He has become very interested in rural broadband now that he has got a real job installing it, and every now and again he is explaining bits of it to me. So far I can tell you that I have not understood a solitary word. It is worse than trying to understand boilers.
I wonder why nobody ever tells you that when the stories say ‘they lived happily ever after’ what they mean is that when they have got a spare half hour in bed, they drink coffee and talk about wiring.
We are both on the taxi rank now. It is dark, and the moon is gleaming silver. Nobody wants to get in taxis tonight, because of it being winter but not Christmas, like in Narnia. Mark could easily have stayed at home with a clear conscience, but he thought that he might as well come out to work, since it is just as easy to read about broadband on the taxi rank as it is in the living room.
I have had a busy housewifely sort of day. It is lovely to have some time to do all of the things that have been making me feel guilty for ages.
I am hampered a bit in this by the dogs endlessly milling about underneath my feet. They are not used to being stuck at home all day, and they are restless and bored. They are usually at the farm with Mark, charging about and barking at anybody walking on the Dalesway footpath and generally doing tiresome dog things of their own.
Now there is only me. When I go from one room to another they heave themselves to their feet and follow me, flopping down again next to whatever I am doing so that they are handy for being tripped over and unfairly shouted at.
I felt sorry for them this afternoon and took them out to run some fidget away in the Library Gardens. Roger Poopy was hugely excited about this, and hurtled off after a distantly unobtainable squirrel with joyful enthusiasm.
His father was far less keen, and sloped off after we had been out for five minutes. I wandered round yelling for him for ages, but eventually found him back on our doorstep, pressed forlornly up against the door as if he were hoping to absorb the warmth of the stove through the glass.
They were glad when Mark came home. Roger Poopy misses him an awful lot. He has taken to chewing the table legs in distress, so I have brought him a bone for tomorrow, when I go to get Oliver for exeat. There is no point in having a tidy house if you sit down for dinner and everything collapses because the legs have been gnawed through.
I am missing Mark as well, although I am not chewing the furniture.
The picture is the Library Gardens this afternoon, with the library in the background.
