Cheap Week

I am on the taxi rank, and it is very, very quiet indeed.

The summer is over. It is properly over, in a warm jerseys and chilly air sort of way, but also in the way of nobody coming here to the Lake District for a holiday.

Actually, that is not quite true. It is Cheap Week, when since nobody wants to be here, hotels sell off rooms at a discount. Old age pensioners come here in their hundreds this week. They come on coaches from places like Glasgow or Rochdale or Blackburn, and potter around in the fading weather. 

Over the years I have spotted that although this demographic might boost the flagging hotel trade at an otherwise quiet time, they are not much good for increasing the general wealth of people who make their living in taxis outside nightclubs. 

On the whole these visitors seem to buzz off to bed at about nine o’ clock. They do not even go out for dinner. I suspect that they save bread rolls and apples from their hotel Inclusive Buffet Breakfast and eat those, thriftily, in their bedrooms, along with cups of tea made from their hospitality tray. 

They mill about during the day, though. They struggle up and down the hill and buy boxes of fudge to give to the neighbour who was watching their house for burglars, and we try, patiently, not to run them over.

Not running them over has been hard work this week, because we have had a film crew cluttering up the town. They are filming something for ITV which we have vaguely heard might be called Deep Something. 

Probably Water, this is the Lake District.

Whatever it is that they are filming, they have managed to be a complete nuisance all week, stopping traffic to film in the roads, and parking massive film-company trucks all over the place. There is a catering van of a size to feed all of Glastonbury Festival, a crane and some lighting trucks. Tonight they have been trundling around the village in a pickup truck with cameras on the back of it, filming somebody pretending to drive a car which they were towing behind them. It is interesting to look at but we will all be very pleased when they buzz off. They take up a very great deal of space in a small village.

Fortunately for our seasonally beginning-to-flag fortunes, Mark has been off installing rural broadband today, leaving me on my own, for the first time in ages.  

I spent much of the day trying to polish away the grubby evidence of the summer.

I have not done this very well yet.

I started with the children’s bedrooms, but lost interest long before I had finished. I will have to go back and clean their bathrooms and wipe up sticky at some later date.

I did manage to clean the camper van, mostly. I emptied the loo, at least, and wiped everything, although I could not be bothered to drag the hoover all the way across the road to clean the carpets. 

The urgency for this is because we are going to go away in it this weekend, I hope. If we organise ourselves properly we will be going over to Oliver’s school for the dedication of the choir and to listen to them singing Zadoc The Priest. I like this. Also they are offering drinks for parents. I like those as well. 

Obviously this trip depends on our making enough cash on Friday and Saturday to be able to have Sunday off. We are lashing money out recklessly on conservatory-inspired purchases at the moment. Mark bought some new guttering today, because all of that needs fixing first. He thinks that if he ties together Ted’s ladders and our next door neighbour’s ladders he will be able to reach the gutters without too much dangerous leaning over.

I think that this sounds very exciting, it is our plan for next week.

I bet you can’t wait to hear all about it.

Have a picture of the rain.