After days of freezing rain, this evening the sun has come out.
This is lovely. Especially it is lovely for Lucy, who is on thug duty at the door of the Albert pub. She has been looking forward to this, because the Albert has quite a few fights when there are stag parties about, and she is hoping for an exciting evening to prepare her for her psychology A Level exam on Monday. I can’t see the door of the Albert from where I am, but I can hear the sirens when they come rushing down the road, if anything thrilling happens I promise I will let you know straight away.
I am sitting on the taxi rank drinking lovely lovely chai tea from my little china cup. I have taken a picture of these to show you, because I am still feeling very happy about the new teabags.
Mark was not working today. He has been getting on with the garden. I thought that this was very brave, considering how truly awful the weather has been. The BBC keeps telling us that the weather is nice, but I think that this might be an example of the bias that everybody is going on about. I can promise you that it has not been anything of the sort in Windermere. It has been grey and grim and sodden, and you would be sensible to go almost anywhere else for your holidays.
Mark has been outside in the rain. He has been clearing the rubble left over from demolishing the shed, which he took to the tip. Then he made some more rubble by knocking the old plaster off the wall where the shed used to be. We have been contemplating the garden very hard today.
When we woke up this morning I insisted that we talked about holidays, because I want one very badly indeed. My whole soul is yearning to be somewhere else. Also life is always much better when there is a bright moment in one’s future to look forward to. The happy looking forward, the warm feeling of a lovely time yet to come, is one of the nicest things in the world.
We talked about this.
Mark wondered why I had not booked one.
I reminded him that we are not yet earning any money. The holiday season has still not started this year, not in the Lake District, and we have all resigned ourselves to the grim knowledge that it probably will not happen at all. There are people here, but not very many, and they are not wealthy people. They are people who have saved up, carefully, for their holiday, and they do not have enough money to lavish it on extravagant evenings of drinking and dancing, followed by exhausted taxi rides home because of the impractical shoes. They are having low budget walks and bringing sandwiches.
We considered this. Of course, things are never that bad, because there will be a season, eventually, and in the meantime there is always rural broadband. Nevertheless this does not leave reckless buckets of spare cash for me to slosh around over the sort of holiday I would like to have, we would be in the walks-and-sandwiches bracket ourselves. I like walks and sandwiches, but holidays are for swimming pools and cocktails. Walks and sandwiches are for school trips and old age pensioners’ rambling clubs.
We pondered this for ages, but surprisingly, in the end I realised that I was not as desperate for a holiday as I had thought. In fact I am really just longing to be somewhere beautiful and lovely. I know that we live in the Lake District but it is raining too much to go and look at any of it. In fact what I am looking at is the wall at the back of the kitchen window and the builders’ yard opposite.
If only we had a splendid conservatory I would not mind the absence of holiday in the least, because I would have somewhere beautiful and lovely of my very own, at home.
Hence the renewed efforts this morning to continue with its construction.
There are all sorts of exciting things going to happen, and if we earn any cash it will be far better to spend it on a conservatory than a holiday.
It has moved forward a little bit more today.
It is bound to be finished for Christmas.
LATER NOTE: There weren’t any fights and it is raining again. Ah well.
