I had the horridest walk this morning.
It was windy, and a bitter, sleety rain was hurling across the Rec, stinging my face as I walked.
It has been raining a very great deal lately, and everywhere is squelching with liquid mud. The beck which runs at the side of the Rec is so full that instead of a beck and a path it is now two becks, with little waterfalls running between them. The path is too beck-like to walk along any more, and is full of water to above ankle height.
I forgot whilst I was writing the last paragraph that some Americans read these pages. Just so you know, ‘beck’ is a Cumbrian word for a stream. All the streams are called Something Beck, this one is actually Mill Beck, but there is Church Beck and How Beck and various other becks. It ought to be called Niagara Beck at the moment. It is impassable.
We went the long way around the beck and climbed the fell. I kept thinking that I had had enough and would like to go back, but some brainless desire not to be defeated kept me going, and so we had the privilege of viewing a sodden Windermere from the top of the fell, where the wind howled and buffeted against us for nearly ten seconds before we turned and slithered back down again.
My plan for the morning at home had been to prune the rose bushes and tidy the garden up. I confess that I did not spend quite as long at this occupation as I had originally intended, and got some strange looks in the short time that I was there, but I was so wet anyway that it did not seem to matter.
When I staggered in through the back door, because the front door is still stuck shut from the damp, I discovered that the fire had gone out.
I was drenched. Water was running through my hair and dripping, irritatingly, off the end of my nose. Worse, all the firewood was in the garden, where Mark had stacked it tidily in the place where the solar panel used to be.
Fortunately this had stayed beautifully dry. It said in the Daily Telegraph that wet wood is going to become illegal in stoves, so I was pleased to discover that I was not being accidentally criminal. I can’t see in any case why you would need to make wet wood illegal, because it is rubbish. It will not light properly and smokes and coughs and doesn’t get properly hot and then goes out.
It is like declaring that bicycles without wheels are to be illegal, why on earth you need to bother with this sort of legislation is beyond me. Wood needs to dry out for at least a year before you can burn it, and preferably two, and the best stuff of all is wood that has once been part of somebody’s house for a couple of hundred years, as long as it isn’t covered in horrible-smelling paint. Somebody else’s house, obviously.
I lit the fire and undressed in the living room. Every single clothe was utterly soaked and heavy. I dumped it all in a pile by the back door and streaked off up the stairs to find some clean ones. The timing of this turned out to be impeccable, because I had been dressed only just long enough to collect up the sodden pile when the dogs started to bark their heads off, and it was Ritalin Boy and his Other Grandma arriving for a cup of tea.
This was lovely, and nice to see Ritalin Boy, even though within moments of his arrival he launched into a series of detailed questions about castration, mostly in reference to dogs. This made his Other Grandma laugh very much, and although I answered as honestly as I could I think he is under one or two misapprehensions about the functions of some basic equipment. If his father is reading this, I have referred him back to you, although I have already attempted to clarify that it is not possible to wee out of other orifices, even with surgery.
Ritalin Boy ate the last of the lemon buns, and his Other Grandma and I had cups of tea in the warm kitchen and discussed hip replacements with interest. This made it a rather lovely afternoon.
I was sorry to see them go, not least because it meant I had to get on with proper housework, like making mayonnaise and putting fresh sheets on Oliver’s bed, but I did not mind any of this, because I was indoors out of the lashing sleet and horrible gale force winds.
My coat was still sodden when I took the dogs out to be emptied before I came out to work, so I had to borrow Mark’s, which smelled funny and I did not like to put my hands in the pockets. Mark’s pockets are a bit like that party game we used to play as children, where you are blindfolded and somebody sticks your finger in half of an orange and tells you that it is Nelson’s eye. It was still raining, and the Library Gardens had a new beck rushing along where once there was a pathway as well.
At the time of writing Mark is not yet back from work.
I hope he has been doing indoor rural broadband.
The picture had the dogs on it when I started to take it but they would not stay still for long enough.
