It is shockingly cold.
There is snow on the fells.
Apart from that detail we are not doing too badly with the global warming apocalypse that is being visited on the rest of the country, who seem, from what I can gather from the BBC, to be suffering divine retribution for all of our years of environmentally indifferent wickedness.
I am quite sure that we in Cumbria are every bit as wicked as the rascals in Yorkshire who are being slowly rinsed out of their living rooms, perhaps we are just wicked and lucky.
I even got my washing dry in the garden today. Well, mostly dry. It is a bit of a faff to have to hang it all outside and then bring it in and hang it all up all over again, but every drop of water that blows away in the garden, and does not finish up steaming up the insides of the kitchen windows, is a bonus. It is one more drop of water that will not be seized and rapaciously devoured up by the black mould monster that lives in the sealant around the windows.
Today we have had a whole day off, without work of any kind.
I can hardly tell you how splendid this has been.
The day seemed to stretch out for ages. It was a bit like being young, when old age seems an utter impossibility, and the world full of glorious promise. When we woke up this morning there was so much I was going to achieve with the day, it seemed inconceivable that bedtime would ever come around.
You will not be surprised to hear that it has been much like life. We squandered a lot of the day sitting on the sofa with the Number Two Daughters, eating fudge and drinking tea. We wasted a bit more dancing around the house to the soundtrack from the Hamilton musical. We frittered even more ambling around the park with the dogs, chucking Roger’s ball and laughing as he tumbled head-over-heels when he couldn’t stop running when he reached it. Then we ate too much and drank some wine. After that bedtime galloped up on us at impossible speed, and suddenly in the middle of the night we just don’t know where all our energy went.
All the same we have not done too badly.
We cleared the living room out a bit this morning and Mark has replastered the bits of the ceiling that had come down. There were more of these than you might think. The inferno had cracked the plaster around the chimney, and taking the boot cupboard wall out had left several splendid holes. Also the site of the melted curtain rail needed some attention. It does not look very middle class to have a melted curtain rail contorting down from your ceiling, and we have taken it down and put it in the dustbin.
It is beginning to look very much better. He has repainted the chimney breast in white, which is quite shockingly white next to the yellow-and-brown smoky ceiling. We have been living in sepia tones and not realised.
Whilst Mark was painting I have been making a start on the hundreds and hundreds of things that needed to be done before Christmas.
I have mixed the mince for the mince pies.
The fruit has been soaking in mix of brandy and cinnamon and nutmeg in a bucket on the top of the fridge since January last year. It smells nicely promising now.
I took a couple of the cinnamon sticks out and put them on the top of the stove to see if they would make the house smell enticingly of brandy-soaked cinnamon as they warmed, but they didn’t. They just dried up and left a sticky mark. I should have learned this lesson from the oranges a couple of years ago, which took ages to scrub off, but obviously I had forgotten all about it until today, when I looked sadly at the slowly-blackening sticky.
It is all recovering a bit. The house is looking better. It now looks like a building site rather than a bomb site, which is a good start.
I think that by the time we get to Christmas things will be looking up.
