We are having a night off.
Mark has been at work all day and I have been making curtains. We are both tired and fed up and do not want to sit in taxis on a deserted taxi rank. Deserted apart from half a dozen other taxis, that is.
It is a lovely evening. I have just taken the picture from my office window this very minute. I would like to take another, because it is changing all of the time, and the colours are already more pink and orange than you can see. I am not going to take another picture, though, there is enough clutter on my phone as it is, and I will spoil the looking at it if I just keep taking photographs. Looking at it is enough.
It is not the photograph I had actually intended to use tonight, because I took the dogs for a scrambly walk up one of the fells this morning, and when we got to the top we had walked through the clouds. We stood in the sunshine looking at the clouds below us, and felt smug, it was the reward for virtue.
It wasn’t the fell side that I usually go up. It was the one in the village with the big arrow pointing up the steep slope, and the sign that says: Walk This Way, so when I got to the top there were about a dozen people there already, like going up Everest except they were all still alive. Worse than that, there were some idiots from London who were rabbiting on and on and on about leaving the EU to some hapless Americans.
I do not go walking in the Lake District to listen to other people’s irritating political opinions. I go so that I can look at the scenery and shout at the dogs and wonder what happens to you when you die. I considered telling them to shut up, but thought that it might come to fisticuffs. Roger Poopy jumped up at them when they made the mistake of trying to befriend him, and left muddy paw prints on their trousers. I thought that this was revenge enough.
We walked down more peacefully, and then I had got to get on with the day’s Things. I wanted to purchase a new telephone, because ours, which is practically antique, is not speaking to me. It is not speaking to anybody. It is sulking, dumbly, in the corner.
I went for a wander round the likely telephone shops in the village, by which I mean Save The Children and Age Concern, but they didn’t have any. The computer shop had one, but it was thirty quid, and I do not like talking that much. I will have to wait until we have got some cash in the bank after the weekend and purchase one from the mighty Internet.
I almost blew my telephone money on some interesting-looking books whilst in the charity shop, but didn’t, which I thought was very restrained. Instead I came home and made mayonnaise, which would have worked better if I had screwed the blender together properly. I hadn’t and it all squelched out of the bottom in a revolting eggy mess, and had to be scraped into a bowl and dumped back in. It took a lot of cleaning up, which I did crossly, wondering if there was somebody else that I could blame for being careless with the blender, but there wasn’t.
After that I potted the plants donated by my mother, in a couple of plant pots that Mark had found in his trailer at the farm. They are not pretty but they are functional and the right size, and so they will do.
I did not want to go in the house again at all. It was so lovely and sunny and tranquil in the about-to-be banana plantation, that I could have stayed out there for the whole day. I wandered about for a bit, picking things up and moving them, and tidying up and hanging washing, but in the end I ran out of excuses and had to go and do my Job Of The Day, which was making Lucy’s curtains.
By teatime I had discovered that the roll end was not quite long enough, and I do not have enough material. No matter how I try and organise the fabric, the only solution would be to make the windows smaller.
I am going to give the market man a ring tomorrow. He thought that he might have a bit more in his warehouse if I was really, really lucky.
We have got some curtains now, though, and they are going to be splendid. I am quite sure that it will work out in the end.
These things usually do.
