To my astonishment, we still have some visitors in the Lake District, and this evening I have actually taken some real people to some actual places.
This is good news, because last night was just about as uneventful as it is possible for a night at work to be. We sat on the taxi rank, undisturbed for hours and hours, reading and drinking tea and looking absently at the peaceful world.
There is a moment in some films, when the camera pans along a deserted street. Nothing is moving, but we know from the music, which is employing the string section at a heartbeat rhythm, that not all is well. Then the brass section crashes in at full volume, as the unexpectedly escaped dinosaur with the massive teeth and the taste for devouring Frenchmen, bursts through a roof so that we all know exactly how huge and terrifying it is, and we all spill our wine with the surprise.
Last night Bowness was like that, only without the music or the dinosaur or the wine.
We gave up after six hours, and when we cashed up, discovered that we had amassed twenty three pounds between us.
This was not much, but we consoled ourselves with the recollection that it was twenty three quid we would not otherwise have had, and also that it had been a significant saving in wine, which we would have been drinking had we been at home, possibly accompanied by music and dinosaurs.
Happily, today Mark did not have to go to work, and we had a whole day to ourselves.
Better still, we had amassed plenty of bits to be installed into the conservatory.
We have been stockpiling these in the way that everybody else has been stockpiling loo roll, because if we develop a cough and have to stay at home, we will need things to keep us occupied. It would be terrible to have to go into self-isolation for a fortnight and to be rattling about with nothing to do.
Hence we have collected all manner of construction materials, like bags of sand and cement for rendering, and handy-looking bits of wood for building things with.
The effect of this is that we can hardly move because the conservatory is absolutely bursting with useful clutter.
Today was the turn of the guttering.
The conservatory has had guttering on two of its three sides, but not the third, which was missing when we bought it.
This has meant that whenever it rained, the wall has become soaked. Weeks of excitingly damp weather has meant that soaked has become sodden, has become a puddle on the conservatory floor.
We underestimate the importance of guttering, houses must have been miserably damp places before we invented it. I can tell you from experience, a great deal of the comfort of our warm dry happy lives are directly attributable to the cleverness of the chap who dreamed up the gutter and the downspout, let us take a moment to appreciate him here.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I stopped at a guttering shop and bought a gutter.
There was some faffing about because of it not being quite the same gutter as the sort that was already on the conservatory. This does not sound like a terrible problem but of course it was. The sort of gutter that we needed is not made any more, and instead we had to purchase one that was almost, although not quite, the same.
This meant that creative measures had to be employed to make it fit, and the clips were a saga unto themselves. The clips that fitted the conservatory would not fit the gutter, and vice versa, and thus a simple sounding task became a tiresome and prolonged project, which was why we had not bothered until now.
However we need to render the wall next, and this is not a good idea when the wall is exuding moisture like a marathon runner’s armpits at the twenty third mile.
In consequence, today saw Mark up a ladder, bashing things and swearing.
I got the less exciting job of cleaning the old plastic fittings which needed to be attached to the roof. This was dull but less challenging, and meant that at least I could listen to the radio.
In the end the jigsaw of plastic bits was glued together, and we now have a gutter. In a few days we will have a dry wall, and it can then be rendered.
We might have Bat Flu by then.
Have a picture of Roger Poopy.
