The rain has drizzled away all of the snow, and the world is mildly chilly and all right again.
I am sitting on the taxi rank, re-reading Wolf Hall in the hopes that the third book in the series will come out this year, and I will be ready for it. It is a splendid book, and I have been so immersed in the cleverness of Cromwell and the awfulness of More that I have hardly been able to tear myself away to write to you. It is pleasant to be idle, and to read other people’s literary efforts instead of getting on with one’s own.
Actually I have been busy with my own literary efforts all afternoon. I am writing a play, which has absorbed me so much that ideas keep occurring to me. I keep leaping up out of bed and from the shower to write another couple of lines. So far I am halfway through Act One Scene One. It has been going round and round and round in my head like one of those little trains on a battery-operated Christmas decoration. We are going to have a tiresome few weeks with it at this rate.
Mark got dinner ready whilst I scowled at the computer and spent half an hour rewriting about six sentences of dialogue. We had had a very lazy Sunday. My parents came to visit this morning on their way back from their hotel, so once we had had our morning coffee in bed we got up and had another one.
They had had a nice time in their lovely hotel, although would have liked more butter with their breakfast. I approve of this, you can never have too much butter with anything. This segued naturally into a discussion about high cholesterol, which we have got, but since we are fortunate enough to live in an age which has invented statins, does not matter. This is indeed a marvellous time to be alive.
They had had one of those Ancestry DNA things done a while ago, and told us about the results, I have got the dullest genetic history I have ever heard of. On the website there are shiny pictures of excited people discovering that they are descended from a mixture of Russian cossacks and Barbados pirates and Peruvian witchdoctors. It all looks very thrilling, and I had been looking forward to unlocking our own genetic treasure chest.
We have now discovered that my mother’s ancestry is almost all Irish and my father’s is from Yorkshire. That seems to be about it. One of them might have had a dalliance with a Norwegian at one time, but only one, and it did not seem to have lasted.
I do not have any exotic rogues in my genetic history anywhere.
Mark’s family is from Yorkshire as well, where they seem to have descended from the long-defunct Ibbetson baronetcy, the chaps who thought it would be a brilliant idea to have a couple of dead sheep featured on their coat of arms.
You would know they were from Yorkshire even if nobody had told you.
I went to the gym again before work, to counter the effects of the butter. It is all very effortful and exhausting. Afterwards I sat in the sauna with a small man who had got so many muscles that he was practically square. He had already been in the gym, but he kept doing more little bits of exercise even in the sauna. It is very difficult not to stare in fascination when people do things like that, but of course to be polite you have got to pretend not to notice the grunting and the shoving coming from two feet away.
I sat in the sauna and steamed gently, without doing any more exercise at all.
I had an ice shower and rub down with ice crystals when I had finished, and thought with smug satisfaction that I might not be thin, but I am quite brave really.
I went to work after that.
I think I might read a bit more of Wolf Hall now.
Have a picture of Windermere.
