Number Two Daughter rang from Australia last night.
It is autumn there, and she is having a holiday in between ski seasons. She has got a job as well. Currently, in the interests of having a varied career, she is having a go at being a gold miner, I believe.
She said that it was all very lovely, and that it is wonderfully cool and seasonally colourful. Apparently it is twenty one degrees. This surprised me, because it is twenty one degrees here as well, and everybody thinks that it is boiling.
It seems that all of our relatives have buzzed off on holiday. Number One Daughter and her little family are climbing up mountains in Spain, and my parents rang up this morning from some southern port where they were waiting to get on a ferry to take them to Bilbao. I have never been to Spain, but it sounds interestingly foreign. Maybe one day.
We might as well be away on holiday, because Windermere is completely full of visitors. We had forgotten about the mild disorientation this brings. When we go out into the village we do not know anybody, all of the faces are completely strange. Of course, everybody who lives here is working their socks off for Easter. We will not see anybody we know until Tuesday, when they will probably be drunk in celebration of it all being over.
We have got several new neighbours for the weekend. One set of these is a family from somewhere urban, whose tattooed father issued dire warnings this morning when his children wanted to stroke Roger Poopy. He knew, on reliable evidence, of dozens of times when people had promised their dog would not bite, but nevertheless it had bitten the child’s hand off anyway.
I thought at first that this was a joke, and so laughed, but it turned out that he believed it, and I was not popular after that. Fortunately, in the event, Roger Poopy did not bite anybody’s hand off, although he was disappointed when he discovered that none of them had anything else promising to eat which they might like to share, and retreated back under the table where he was chewing a stick, presumably because he is not allowed to eat hands.
There are about six children, all aged somewhere between five and eight, which makes us think that it is probably the coming together of parents who have had previous relationships. The children have been playing in the alley for most of the day. We have been in the back yard building site, so we have been listening to them chirping and squeaking, which has made us laugh. Mark has mended all of their bicycles, blown the tyres up and oiled the chains, and we had a sad little moment with one of the little girls, who we found sobbing behind the taxi because she had fallen off her bike.
The others said that she couldn’t ride it because she had special needs, so obviously we said briskly that this was nonsense, because anybody can ride a bike if they practise. Mark held the bike and wheeled her up and down the alley for a while, but she was quite convinced that she would never be independently mobile, and in the end he had to stop, because we had to get ready for work. Oliver said that he would help her when he had finished his homework, we will see how he gets on.
I am on the taxi rank now, it has been a busy evening. I have written this in quiet moments, there have not been very many so it has been a bit disjointed. I have kept coming back to it and not been able to remember what I was talking about.
I have had enough now. I am going to leave you and have a cup of tea whilst it is quiet.
See you tomorrow.
