It is midnight, and I have only just started.
This was because I couldn’t be bothered.
We are in the camper van. I am sorry to have to tell you that we have not been building campfires and singing songs and listening to the sounds of the night, like proper gypsies. Instead we have spent the past two hours sprawled idly on the sofa eating chocolate buttons and watching ancient episodes of A Game Of Thrones. This was because we are with Lucy, and she has not seen them yet.
We do not mind this in the least, because it is nice to be reminded of what has happened in the far distant past. It is so long since we first watched them that we had forgotten all sorts of things and so it is rather splendid to see them again. We were amused to notice how much younger all of the actors were, it has been a true epic production.
Incidentally, please will nobody write on Facebook what is happening in the last episodes. I am dying to know but we have not watched it yet, and people keep dropping dark hints about mysteries and plot twists and adventures. The only possible unexpected plot twist that I can think of is that they all live happily ever afterwards. That would be truly astonishing.
It has turned out to be a good thing to do because it means that we do not mind that Oliver is not with us. Oliver, inexplicably, does not want to watch A Game Of Thrones, even though we have explained that there are absolutely thousands of zombies, and so I did not feel at all guilty about leaving him out.
We ate two bags of chocolate buttons and some mini eggs. I am feeling decidedly portly now.
We are in Northamptonshire, parked, not terribly inconspicuously, in a lay by outside the police station. We had a bit of a walk with the dogs when we arrived, and thought that it was all very civilised. There are little roads especially for bicycles, which weave underneath the main roads for cars. These worked brilliantly for the dogs as well, and they rushed about and barked at birds.
At least, Roger Poopy charged about. His poor decrepit father has not really recovered from the walk up the fell the other day, and dawdled about and limped on his bad leg. This made us worry about the extra long walk we have got planned for weekend, because he will be jolly heavy to carry if he dies halfway round, even in a rucksack.
We are here because Lucy has got to go in tomorrow and do her fitness test. This will be at eight o’clock in the morning, and will be the Bleep Test.
We may not have helped her chances by adding an elderly bottle of French champagne to the chocolate buttons and the film. We had this stored in the camper van waiting for a nice time, and tonight qualified. We put strawberries in the glasses, which fizzed excitingly and gave me hiccups. Unfortunately none of us have had a drink for ages, and it made everybody decidedly squiffy.
We had to get up especially early this morning, and even then it was eight o’clock tonight before we got here. Northamptonshire is a ridiculously long way, especially when you have got to go to York first.
We collected Lucy and then stopped for a restorative cup of tea, during which Mark, excitingly, rang the haulage man to order three tons of straw.
The purpose of this is to build a shed in Mark’s field at the farm. It will not be a proper shed, because the National Park Committee For Beautiful Things does not want a proper shed there, and has been a bit unflattering about the pile of other junk that he has stacked up being a Blot On The Landscape.
Hence he is going to build a large straw house which will look just like a pile of straw, and hide all of his things underneath it. This has the twin advantages of being cheap and would not upset David Attenborough. More importantly, it will not upset the Committee, who are not allowed to make you move anything agricultural, and straw definitely qualifies for this. Better still, when it all rots away in a year or two, we can put it on a vegetable patch.
Lucy listened to all of these plans and reflected that she need not worry, because she would have left home, just in the nick of time, by the time we managed to get it organised. She wondered if we had ever listened to the cautionary tale of the terrible fate of the Three Little Pigs.
I imagine that the first little pig must have lived in the Lake District.
That would explain it. 
