We are in the middle of the bank holiday, and there is not much to say about it, except that we are eating and sleeping and sitting on the taxi rank.
Windermere is busy.
In fact, it is not as busy here as it used to be. The Lake District is less fashionable than it once was. These days people go abroad for their hen parties if they can, mostly because of the predictability of the sunshine and the desirability of foreign waiters.
It is not raining this weekend, but there is a chill in the air, and I have put my jerseys back on. I am very glad that we live now and not a hundred years ago. My grandfather’s mother used to sew him and his brothers into vests made of brown paper and goose grease during the winters. These are not the sort of garments that can easily be replaced once they have been discarded, you would need to be quite certain of your springtime decision to undress. I am very glad to report that all of my vests come from Marks & Spencer, not least because of the advances in laundry technology.
It has been an uneventful weekend so far. I took a couple of young men back to Grange-over-Sands late last night, and we had to make four stops on the journey for them to be unwell at the side of the road. Also I am seriously considering becoming the sort of taxi driver who makes spurious unconvincing excuses not to take dogs or pushchairs, but apart from that it is all proceeding unremarkably.
It was daylight when we crawled into bed this morning. We have got thick blackout curtains, so this does not matter, and we slept soundly until lunchtime.
The day was short, because of work, and kept busy with the usual sort of trivia that occupies weekends.
I went out into the front garden to cut the grass and tug out the weeds. Mostly these are a sort called Spitters, because of the way they fire their seeds, with little pops, over a large distance. You have got to uproot them before the seeds are ripe, because otherwise just touching the plant will set the seeds off to bursting, and then you are lost.
In my youth I worked in a plant nursery, where the removal of spitters was one of my daily duties. It was a wonderful old-fashioned plant nursery, not one of these horrible garden centres, and we made compost and repotted tiny seedlings and nurtured plants into life. Not a single ornamental fountain was to be found in its hallowed precincts, they dispensed plants and wisdom, and nothing else, with the end result that of course eventually it went broke and had to close. I have worked both in a plant nursery and in the sort with children, and believe me there is no contest. I like to nurture tiny things into life, especially the sort that can’t talk.
Unlike the children’s nursery, it was a peaceable place to work. We listened to Radio Four in the potting shed, and when we were working in the gardens there was nothing to be heard except birdsong. One tiresome bird had learned how to imitate the noise of the telephone, and when we were all at the far ends of the garden it would perch on the top of the potting shed and ring, presumably for the pleasure of watching us all rushing back up the paths. It was a rather splendid sort of job, and I did not appreciate it in my youth nearly as much as I would today.
Today I made the picnic and filled the garden with washing, and Mark carried on cleaning the drum kit.
He has made the surprising discovery that the bass drum has been put together upside down, and the legs are going the wrong way to keep it stable when you hit it. It looks as though it has been like that for ages, the previous owner must have had to put some chewing gum underneath it or something, because it can only have slid away every time he touched it.
All the same, it is starting to look very splendid indeed.
Oliver comes home next weekend.
Our peaceable days might well be numbered.
