I am on the taxi rank, eating chocolate and drinking tea in the quiet darkness.
I am allowed to eat the chocolate because I have been swimming. I am having a very pleasant evening of reading and thinking and now writing to you, almost completely undisturbed by anybody wanting to go anywhere at all.
This is not because Windermere is quiet. On the contrary, during the day it is the most astonishing hubbub of activity. Absolutely everywhere is being given at least a lick of paint, and some places are being torn apart at the seams and resculpted in vibrant modern tones of tourist-enticing colours. The roads are being dug up and resurfaced, and there are traffic cones and scaffolding all over the place.
Even the Co-op is closed. It has been emptied and refilled with bags of plaster and saw benches. I am not pleased about this, even though they sold off the end of the vegetables and cocktail sausages at knock-down bargain prices at the very end before they shut. I made the vegetables into a thick pottage for Mark and his friend Ted to eat at work, and gave the sausages to the dogs. I am not yet sunk quite that low.
Everywhere will be closed until Valentine’s Day. The art gallery has taken all of the pictures down to paint the walls. The restaurant at the far end of the village has closed for ever and turned into a furniture shop, and the village has been repopulated by rugged looking types with crooked hand-rolled cigarettes, wearing woolly hats and dusty overalls.
Here on the taxi rank it is quiet. I do not have to share the tea, because Mark has been out at work all day and has not come out to work again tonight. He is at home with Oliver. They are feverishly doing their maths homework, because school restarts for both of them tomorrow.
I have had a busy day. Apart from all of the usual washing-and-cooking activities with which I occupy my action-packed life, I have had to take Mark’s car to get some tyres on it, because the tyre man is open again.
This was a scary thing to do, because he has been closed for so long that the tread on Mark’s tyres was starting to become rather shallower than strictly appropriate.
I drove very carefully indeed in order not to attract the attention of anybody in a police car.
You will be pleased to hear that it was all right, and I am still in possession of a clean driving licence, and also, now, of four shiny new tyres. This meant that I did not need to hang about being cautious on the way back, and went straight to the garage in Kendal so that the car could have an MOT.
I was a bit early for the MOT, and it was too cold for me to want to hang about the garage and wait. You might recall that there is still no heater in Mark’s car. After driving to Lancaster and waiting whilst the car had four tyres put on I had become so terribly cold that I could not feel my toes even through the sheepskin boots, and my fingers hurt.
I walked into Kendal.
It is about a mile. I had not warmed up even by the time I got there, and I went into the shopping centre and just stood near the heaters, in the warmest bit I could find, until my fingers began to thaw.
Then I did something so terribly self-indulgent I have not yet even told Mark.
I went into Waterstones.
I had got some money on my Waterstones card that I have been saving, and I put twenty pounds out of my taxi takings towards it as well.
I bought some books to read on the taxi rank during the long winter evenings.
In all the time I have been married I have never, ever done anything like this.
Wandering about shops during the daytime frittering money is an activity for people who don’t have to pay school fees, and certainly not something that should be done in January.
Sometimes we go shopping, but we go together and agree first whether we can afford things.
In January we try not to buy anything at all.
I have never just gone out and recklessly blown money on books without telling anybody first, especially ones that nobody but me is likely to read.
It was both an unspeakable joy and a wickedness all rolled in to one.
I had become so reckless by that point that I compounded it by going to Farrers and having a cup of coffee and some hot buttery crumpets.
I sat with my coffee and read my new books and felt truly sophisticated, like a woman of the world, a Lady Who Lunches, warm at last, and breathing in the lovely fresh coffee smell.
It made the walk back to the garage feel much brighter.
The car passed its MOT, and I have come out to work in some small atonement for my hedonism. Of course I know that Mark will say that it is all right, but all the same, I have spent lots of money at a time when there is none, on sheer extravagance.
It was wonderful and terrible all at the same time.
I shall tell him when I go home. Really I will.
Have a picture of the Lake District.
