I think it is no exaggeration to say that today’s weather has been horrible beyond the reach of normal superlatives, at least the sort that it would be all right to use in these pages.
We woke up, and discovered, to our astonishment, that there was a thick coating of snow on the ground.
Actually Mark discovered it. I was still asleep. I was so thoroughly still asleep that I completely failed to hear either the alarm going off or Mark and the dogs clattering grumpily into one another as they staggered down the stairs.
My introduction to the day happened some time later, and involved wet dogs and coffee.
It was not still snowing. It was raining, quite a lot.
We looked at the beautiful pristine snow and thought sadly that it would soon be gone.
We were wrong about this.
The rain turned out to be a horrible sleety cold rain that did not melt the snow but transformed it into an icy white slush. This lasted for the whole day.
Few weathers are less lovely than sleet on top of thick snow on top of floods.
The Lake District, collectively, took one look out of its bedroom window and went back to bed.
Ted rang and told Mark not to come to work. The schools closed. The shops did not open. The buses did not run and the world stopped.
We went out to the bank later on. Fortunately this was open, because Helen behind the counter only lives just by the Rec, and can easily, although presumably not terribly enthusiastically, walk into work.
I was very glad of the good boots.
There were puddles to be circumnavigated which were above ankle depth, and the pavements were broken-hip slippery beneath the sodden snow. We slithered and tottered cautiously, and the rain trickled down our necks.
When we got home Mark brought in firewood and I hung the sheets to dry, whilst the dogs, disappointed of their run up the fell, milled about under our feet disconsolately. I was sympathetic. It is disorientating when a day does not go the way that you expect, and mine had turned up an unexpected husband under my feet. Mark is not the sort of presence that you do not notice in a small house, especially when he is fixing things.
Today he was fixing the new work surfaces in the about-to-be kitchen. This involved a lot of squinting along a spirit level, and eventually some noise and dust. This was tiresome just before we have visitors, but I have come to see it as an inevitable feature of marriage, like the soap dish being full of water or the washing machine filter being stuffed full of screws or Netflix thinking that you would like to watch a film about gunmen and car chases.
I cleaned the bathroom, because it was Monday, which is cleaning day, and because we have got visitors coming. You never know when a visitor might run a disapproving finger along your skirting boards.
My grandmother told me that you should dust all your skirting boards every week, which I don’t. Fortunately, dirty skirting boards do not seem to be the source of any vile unclean diseases, otherwise we would all be dead by now. Between ourselves, I don’t even do it annually. Nobody has ever seemed to notice.
I wiped one of them today, which was what reminded me of this philosophy, because it had black mould growing on it, the skirting boards not the philosophy. I thought about how much extra time my grandmother would have had for drinking tea and darning socks if only she had known that skirting boards could be left alone and disapproving visitors ignored, and felt glad of my own idleness.
The bathroom could not be left alone, however, because it would have been obvious even to the least attentive observer that something unpleasantly cementy, probably involving dogs, had happened there.
You can hardly tell at all now.
Once we had achieved a decent respectability I turned my attention to the raspberry ice cream. You will be pleased to hear that this has turned out brilliantly well. I did not bother with the ripple bit in the end, but I did think to add some damson gin to help the party go with a swing.
I made crumble and meringues. These last are still in the oven even as I write, still drying slowly hours later. I did not make them into a bowl shape in the end, which proved to be beyond my creative abilities, mostly because I couldn’t find a bowl which would both look respectable and survive in the oven. Anyway, they can be served with the rest of the raspberries, and honey and yoghurt and cream whipped together and poured over the top.
It is going to be a nice party, especially if I do not accidentally get drunk before pudding.
I suppose it is is a good thing for my internal lard collection that we have to live on raw carrots and slices of melon in picnics for most of our lives. I would be wearing very much larger trousers if I were to cook everything that I felt like.
Mark took the picture this afternoon.
