Tuesday

Mark has become fed up of my milling about the house being obsessively worried about the prison service.

He thinks that none of it is worth sleepless nights and not eating properly.

We did not have any spare cash, but all the same, this evening he announced that instead of going to work, he was going to take me out.

I did not feel much like being taken out, but thought that I might as well be miserable with a glass of red wine as with a flask of tea.

He is my absolute hero.

We went to an Italian restaurant in Bowness called The Trattoria. We have been there before, but it was years ago, when somebody else owned it. I liked the somebody else very much, but have got to admit that the new chap has jolly well got his ideas sorted out.

We take him home in the taxis sometimes, and have been entertained by his obsessive perfectionism. He worries very much about everything being exactly as it should be, and about customers having a perfect dining experience.

I admire this very much. When customers get in the taxi, mostly I am concerned about whether or not they have got some money and are not likely to be sick. The perfect taxi experience comes a long way down my list of worries.

That is not entirely true, actually. I am mortified if I make a mistake, like going round a corner so that people are unbalanced and things slide about, or being in the wrong gear. I feel cross if people say what a good driver I am, for a woman, but underneath I am also a bit pleased.

Anyway, if you are going to go to a restaurant, one with an obsessive perfectionist in charge is a good sort of choice.

It did not take very long before I felt myself seriously considering the possibility of cheering up, although I am prepared to admit that this might have been partly due to the enormous glasses of wine.

We had gnocchi.

I was very pleased about this, because I have now found out what it is, and I have been wondering, on and off, for ages. It is not the sort of thing that you like to ask about in case everybody else knows and then patronises you for being not middle-class enough. Also I have never wondered about it seriously enough to look it up on Google, because life is quite short really.

For any unsophisticates out there, it is mashed potato which has been scooped into little round balls and then fried. Mine was served with creamy sauce and pine nuts, and Mark’s with tomatoes. We liked it very much, it is lovely to be so middle class that you can airily order gnocchi in a restaurant, even if you have got to point to it on the menu because you are not entirely sure how it should be pronounced.

It was a nice meal, enlivened by the film company that has been haunting Windermere for the last few weeks, waving enormous lights about and being a nuisance to the traffic in the road outside. We have become quite used to them, it will be odd when they go away.

When we had eaten more than we really needed to eat, which I imagine my metabolism will squirrel away on my bottom for future hard times, we went to the cinema.

We went to see Bohemian Rhapsody.

It was absolutely glorious.

We held hands all the way through, and I cried at the end. I have read Brian May’s autobiography, or perhaps it was a biography, I can’t remember now, and also a book about Kenny Everett, and so I knew a bit about the way the story had happened: and the music is, of course, wonderful.

It was a magnificent, encouraging, uplifting film.

We sat in silence through all of the titles at the end, and then held hands to tiptoe outside afterwards, in the way you do when neither of you can bear to break the magic with words.

I don’t think anything better could have happened to me.

My life is just fine. I shall get on and live it to the full.