It has been the hottest of hot sunny days, and we are in the camper van, having our second night off this week. This is reckless, and idle, and wonderful, we will starve to death and then roast in hell, and I don’t care.
In fact it is nine o’ clock, and I am struggling to stay awake. We have been swimming in High Dam.
It was only for an hour or two, because we don’t have the children with us, and despite trying to persuade Number Two Daughter that she might wish to swim, she was quite determined not to, having been swimming a couple of times already this week. Thus there was just the two of us, and we had hardly anything to carry as we hiked up the fellside, just our own swimming costumes and a couple of towels.
Up until that point we had been having a busy sort of day. Mark has fixed his car, and I have been cooking.
I did some nicely cooling things because it is so hot. I made a fruit drink out of melon and mint leaves and lemon juice, and I filled a jug with water and lemon and cucumber and put it in the fridge.
Then I cooked pieces of spiced chicken for people to eat in hungry emergencies, and made a cauliflower risotto and a blueberry cake for Mark’s dinners.
In between times I listened to the news, and worried a bit about my parents, whose house is just next to the huge fire that is spreading all over the moorlands a bit further south. They sounded perfectly all right on the phone, if resigned to probably having burnt fields, but not especially worried that their house would be engulfed by a massive flaming inferno.
I was not convinced, but they are in the middle of it and presumably know what they are talking about, whereas my expertise comes from pictures on Facebook. I thought that it would probably turn out all right. We wondered if they would like to come and visit us, because we are not inhaling smoke all the time, but they said that in fact they weren’t either, and that it only seemed to be smoky at night when everything cooled down.
I hope that the Army get the fire put out. The news said that the Home Office were monitoring the situation closely, which Mark said meant that they were watching it on the television, like everybody else.
This took almost all of the day, and eventually we were hot and tired and sticky, and thought that we would like to swim.
It is a bit of a trek up the fell side, but it was worth it. The lake was absolutely lovely.
It has warmed up lots now, because there has been so much sunshine, and it was not at all difficult to get in. It was especially not difficult for the dogs, who do not at all like swimming, and so we threw them in, because they have been horribly hot and needed to cool off. Also they smell interesting and I thought that a rinse would do them good. They were not going to get in the water voluntarily, so they had an unexpected compulsory plunge.
We swam and dried off in the sunshine, and then swam again. Dragonflies skimmed over the surface of the water, and we watched a heron flapping heavily above the trees. The water had cool patches in it where it had been stirred up by people swimming, and the cold water from the bottom had been displaced up to the top, which were nice to swim through. It was beautiful and perfect, and we came down the fell feeling sleepy and refreshed.
LATER NOTE:
It is not nine o’ clock at night any more. It is five o’ clock in the morning, and I have just woken up.
We thought that we might just have a little snooze there, just for half an hour, before we went home.
It is now five in the morning.
The thing is that it is wonderfully cool here, in the woods, and we have had weeks and weeks of being too hot to sleep properly really, and when we dozed off we stayed dozed off, and slept, soundly and contentedly, until now, which is when we have got to get up and organise ourselves, because we are not at home, we are in the camper van miles away, and Mark has got to go to work.
We had better get a move on.
The picture is Mark, watching the little fish nibbling his feet.
