Calm before the storm

I am feeling horribly guilty.

We did not hang about at Elspeth’s house this morning, although we might have liked to, we could have had fresh croissants for breakfast and talked about May celebrations. When you are old it is better to talk about May day celebrations than actually to do them, because of draughts and stinging nettles.

Instead we packed up the camper and lurched off ponderously down the road.

We went to Kendal.

In fact we went to Kendal hospital.

Obviously we are not ill,  indeed, it is because we are not ill that we could go.

Mark has had a little card from the GP telling him to go and get his knees X-rayed. He has had this for ages. Mostly we had forgotten to do anything about it, but then we got flu, and thought that it would be better not to fill Kendal hospital with hideous ravening bacteria. After that we forgot again.

The X-ray is because he has got problems with his knees. They grind and crunch and clunk, and he takes ibuprofen to make them feel better.

The GP said that it was because of psoriasis and that it would not get better and so he should go and have an X-ray.

He explained that there was nothing that could be done about the knees, with or without the X-ray, but that it would be a good idea to have one, and gave him a card which said he could go whenever he liked.

Under those circumstances there did not seem to be any urgency and so we have not bothered for ages. We had not bothered for such a long time that when we finally got there this morning the receptionist said that the card had expired and that instead of having an X-ray we ought to go back to the GP and get another card.

We argued about this, because it has been tiresome enough to get round to it once, the chances of bothering again were, we thought, vanishingly small.

In the end they agreed that they would see him. They made him take his trousers off and put on a ridiculous hospital dress, which made me laugh. I did not take a photograph, because it would have been unkind, but I expect you can imagine.

He had the X-ray and put his trousers back on. The nurse said not to bother pestering the GP for the results for at least three or four weeks, which was fine because we were not going to, because of not being interested, and we trundled off.

We went to Asda, which is handily next to the hospital, and bought everything we will need to see us through the busy weekend, like sausages, mostly, and then instead of going home we went to the farm.

We parked on the field and ate the most enormous breakfast, because we were starving by then. We ate fried bacon and the final remains of the Chinese takeaway that we bought when we went for Krav Maga last week, and which has turned out to be the gift which just kept on giving. For the benefit of the concerned, we fried it a lot because we know that week old Chinese rice is probably poisonous, but it was ages ago now and we are still not dead so it was probably all right.

I am ashamed to say that we did not do lots of farm jobs. We fell asleep.

When we woke up it was almost time to go to work.

We had a cup of tea and a tin of shop biscuits that I had forgotten that we had. We never eat shop biscuits because of doing all my own baking which means that I can be smugly supercilious about the ones you buy in shops, but actually they were not too bad. They don’t really taste of anything except sugar, and you have got to eat lots before you are full, but we ate them anyway.

We went home.

We drove past the taxi rank.

There were seven taxis parked on it.

We parked the camper van and went into Windermere to vote.

There was nobody there.

The bars and the restaurants were all empty. It was like strolling around the set of one of Oliver’s zombie massacre films, in the quiet moments before the massacre, when you know from the music that something horrible is going to happen and you start feeling uncomfortable and wishing that you were doing something else. Then as you start to relieve the tension by getting up to make a cup of tea, a blood-drenched zombie leaps out from behind a pillar, and you squeak embarrassingly and make everybody else laugh.

No zombies leaped out on us.

Mark said that it is because of the busy weekend ahead. Nobody is here yet. Tomorrow lunchtime people will start arriving in their hundreds.

We got back in the camper van and went back to the farm, where we spent the evening.

We were going to spend the night there as well, but guilt got the better of me and in the end we came home.

There was still nobody in the village when we came back.

It will be all right. We can spend tomorrow organising our lives ready for work. We have got a busy weekend ahead and we are going to need to cook the sausages. It is the calm before the storm.

The picture shows Roger Poopy and Elspeth’s dog Rebel this morning. They are not tiptoeing through the tulips. They are hoofing madly through the bluebells.