I am finding this difficult to write tonight. I have been trying, but the words are refusing to flow.
I do not know why this is.
I would like to be telling you cheery stories about the sunshine, and about interesting family activities because it is half term, but somehow these merry yarns are not tripping brightly from my fingers.
Instead I have put off writing it almost all night, it is now nearly midnight. I have made several false starts and then deleted them and abandoned the idea in favour of reading the online newspaper instead.
There is nothing interesting in the newspaper. It is full of stories about us having not left the European Union. I know perfectly well that we have not left the European Union and so do not need to read any more about it, but it is much easier to skim through other people’s outpourings of righteous indignation than it is to concentrate on stringing seven hundred coherent words together into a diary entry.
It is not even as if I have had a difficult day. I have made strawberry fudge, which turned out very well, and some apple and ginger chutney, which I haven’t tried yet. It should be all right, though, I have chucked in lots of onions and chillis and garlic and peppercorns, and it should spice up cheese sandwiches very nicely over the winter. It has also made the house smell rather lovely, a sharp, fruity smell of autumn.
I have not actually finished making it yet, it is still sitting in its pan on top of the cooker. It needs to boil again because I turned it off and went for an afternoon snooze instead, but there is always tomorrow.
These are not earth-shaking events with which I might hope to thrill my readers, but I have managed more with far less auspicious beginnings.
In fact much of the day has been occupied with Oliver. He came for our walk up the fell this morning, and then afterwards he and Mark, who has got an unexpected couple of days free from rural broadband, did some things to his bike. I do not know what they were. There was some metallic-looking string involved. It might have been to do with the gears.
Afterwards Oliver said that his bike ran far more smoothly, so all I have to do now is try and arrange to post it to school.
I have not been very successful with this project yet.
Oliver can’t take it with him because he is going on the train, and I think he is going to have quite enough problems with connections as it is, without having to rush up and down trains trying to dig a bicycle out from underneath a pile of luggage in the guard’s van before the connecting train sails merrily off without him. Some challenges are just too exciting.
I shall ask the nice chap at the post office. I hope he will not expect me to wrap it.
We have not really seen very much of Oliver for the last few days. He has been occupying his holiday thoroughly engrossed in an online game that he is playing. This involves being a member of the US Cavalry in an imaginary part of America about a hundred years ago, and it has kept Oliver blissfully enthralled for ages, we only see him when he comes down to tell us about it.
I am pleased about this. I think it is wonderful that Oliver can make friends from absolutely everywhere, and share his game playing with them.
The colonel of his military cyber-unit is in reality an American postman, although I think he is wasted on such mundanities. He really ought to be a real colonel, because he seems to be jolly good at it. The sergeant had to step out for a while this evening because he was doing his geography homework. It is beyond magnificent. Oliver can be quietly in his bedroom and interacting with the whole world, what brilliant times we live in.
I have had enough. I am going to breathe a sigh of relief and read my book for a while. It is a very rubbish book, I shall tell them so when I take it back to the library and perhaps they will throw it away. All the same it is better than the newspaper.
Perhaps I will be more inspired tomorrow.
