We have had a quietly sleepy day.
It is jolly nice not to have to get up early.
We sat in bed for ages with coffee this morning, contemplating the world.
In fact we were considering our not-terribly-imminent retirement.
Due to our lack of financial planning and tendency to invest heavily in the things that we feel like doing today rather than in the things that we might want to do when we get old, we are rather unprepared for our old age.
This does not matter, because by then we will have stopped having to pay school fees. Once we get to this point we will be so flush with money that we will be able to save up for our entire retirement in about two years.
Mark’s friend Ted, with whom he is in business, does not have much of a pension plan either, but in his case it is because he has spent absolutely everything he has got on supporting their forty foot yacht in the Mediterranean. This is an expensive way of getting an all-over suntan.
He can do this because his children are still too young for school fees.
We were speculating about whether we would like to have a yacht in the Mediterranean in our old age.
We have discussed sailing at some length with the children, who very much want to go and do some. They want to sail to India once they have left school.
We have been considering this for a while.
I think that it would be dull to live on a yacht. You have got to wear shorts and drink Prosecco and sit in deckchairs. We thought that we would be bored by the end of the first afternoon.
I liked the idea of the sailing, even though I have never tried to do it. Mark liked that idea as well, although he pointed out that we both get seasick.
We got out of bed and went for our walk up the fell. It was not like being on a yacht in the Mediterranean. It was raining a snowy sort of rain, and the air was heavy with an icy mist.
We did not talk much on the way up, because when you are trying to become fit it is not like the ordinary strolling along sort of walking. You have got to walk so fast that there is no breath left for anything extra, like blowing your nose or talking to somebody.
Once we had puffed our way up to the top and glanced around at the chilly world below us until we had got our breath back, we could talk a bit more.
Mark thought that a yacht was all very well for Ted, but that we are probably canal barge sort of people. You do not have to wear beige deck shoes and a stripy T shirt on a canal barge, and you can drink absolutely anything you like, which is most things in my case. You can wear boots and collect firewood and mend your bicycle on the deck.
We thought that we would like this better.
It was nice to have reached this conclusion. This means that we will never feel envious of Ted and his yacht, because we know that however nice it sounds, really we do not want one.
I thought wistfully of the suntan, though.
At home I cooked scrambled eggs with cheese and ham and olives for breakfast, and then we thought that it was such a cold, shivery sort of day that went back to bed and slept soundly until it was time to go to work.
When we retire I think I would like to have a suntan.
The rest is all detail.
