As it turns out, we are still in the camper van.
We were going to go home today, but we didn’t.
The first thing that stopped us was a text message from somebody who said that they were the electricity board.
They explained that the weather was terrible, which we were starting to notice, and that they were expecting that it would be too inclement for them to continue with their provision of electricity. Therefore, they announced, we should expect blackouts at any minute.
I had some sympathy. I feel like that about the provision of taxis on wet days.
The second thing that happened was a telephone call from Number Two Daughter. She has been abandoned to her own resources, and has called occasionally to tell me that the house has burned down, leaving her crawling about miserably in the rubble with nothing to keep her company but the empty fridge.
She also remarked on the rubbishness of the weather. Windermere is flooded, she said, with relish, and added that the Met office had issued a warning for people not to travel. Disasters, she foretold, with happy satisfaction, were expected at any moment.
She observed that the obvious consequence of this was that the number of people arriving in the Lake District for a little holiday had dwindled considerably.
In fact, she said, there was nobody about anywhere and she was going to stop bothering about sitting hopefully in a taxi and go and sit in her bedroom instead, where she could watch a film with the last of the electricity.
We considered this.
I had got to go to York to collect the children in the morning.
Rather than brave powerlessness and the choppy waters of the A66, which might possibly be closed tomorrow if the weather became exciting, we decided that we would cut out the middle bit, and go directly to York. Do not pass Go, do not collect any takings.
Number Two Daughter said helpfully that she had not collected any takings anyway.
The decision was made, and so the night finds us unexpectedly in a lay-by outside Lucy’s school.
It is raining very hard, but we do not mind. We are stuffed full of dinner and also of Bailey’s Irish Cream which was generously donated by my father.
The weather did not start off being rubbish this morning.
We woke up in Blackpool to a warmish, greyish day, and we had a farewell cup of coffee with my father before taking the dogs for a long, splashy walk along the beach.
The first drops of rain were starting to fall as we set off back, just a very few, and then suddenly there were puddles everywhere.
This meant that we did not much want to go for a stroll along the Promenage to the Tower, not even to visit Waterstones, which we had thought that perhaps we might do.
Then the Electricity Board wrote to us, and we did not think that we wanted to go home either.
Instead of going home, we thought that we would spend the day looking at furniture shops and wondering how we might manage the comfortable chairs thing and also to fill the new conservatory.
There are several large furniture shops between Blackpool and York.
After a little while we had sat on so many dining room chairs that we were beginning to consider ourselves experts.
There were leather ones and velvety ones, wooden ones and steel ones, plastic ones and woven cane ones.
We liked the steel legs. Roger Poopy chews chair legs when he thinks that nobody is looking.
Mark likes leather chairs. I hate them, especially when wearing shorts.
We did not find any at all that we thought we might like to buy, not even when we looked at the most expensive that we could possibly find, which usually does the trick.
This is because we want them to have arms, and it appears that nobody does that any more.
I want arms on my chair so that I don’t keep accidentally putting my elbows on the table, and also because if I get so fat that I can’t sit in between them it will give me a hint to go on a diet.
There were almost none with arms.
We found an armchair that we liked, but it was not for pulling up to the kitchen table and eating hearty dinners. It was for loafing about in front of a television.
We liked that idea but thought that we were unlikely to get round to it.
In the end we did not buy a single thing, which was not very difficult because of not having any money.
We drove to York as chairless as the day we set off.
We will have to look on eBay.
