I am writing this early in order to have finished by the time the dear Queen addresses us. I would like to give that moment my full attention, preferably with a glass of wine in my hand, and regular readers might have notice that the literary merit of these pages diminishes considerably when I am intoxicated.
I have told the children that they are obliged to listen, because it is an Historic Moment, and I do not wish them to miss out on the fullness of the exciting times in which we are living.
Obviously I mean that the times are exciting in a very dull sort of way. It is very nice to have a compulsory holiday, and I am in no rush for it to be over, but it is a very different sort of excitement.
It is not the same sort of excitement as the glass floor in Blackpool Tower or the roller coaster on the Pleasure Beach, during which experiences the excitement is almost indistinguishable from indigestion. It is not even exciting in the same way as a visit to discuss an overdraft with the bank manager.
One or two of those have been pretty hair-raising, actually.
Mark has taken the dogs over to the farm to saw up some firewood. I have been a bit worried about this activity, because you are supposed to Stay At Home and not do day trips, but he went anyway. Even though the weather is warmer we still need firewood.
Certainly we will need it next year, and at this time of year it is important to be cutting and splitting next winter’s wood. It has been cut down and lying in a massive pile for a year now, and needs to be split and stacked so that it can be burned. This is most especially true now, because among all of the other newly-illegal things, you are not allowed to burn wood on your stove if it has not been drying for at least a year, and preferably more.
We do seem to have a lot of laws at the moment. It is very difficult to do anything at all without worrying that you might be getting into trouble. I am very glad I am not Lucy, what an awful lot of rules the police have got to start to remember.
Mark brought some of the wood home the other day. He is bringing firewood all the time, but this time he brought some huge pieces of softwood, ripsawed into big flat slices, and we have put them in a black plastic tank underneath the potting benches in the conservatory.
We have planted mushrooms in them. We are growing oyster mushrooms and shiitake mushrooms and another sort whose name I forget which might be Lion King mushrooms. Also I have never found out how to pronounce Shiitake, and so I can only tell people about them by the medium of the written word. I am functionally dumb on the topic, not that anybody was interested anyway.
All the same, I am quite excited about them. The conservatory floor is heated and so the tank will get nicely warm, it is damp and sawdusty and dark. We will have mushrooms and tomatoes and lemons and lettuce and strawberries all growing in our very own conservatory, along with an abundance of herbs and one glorious future day there will be bananas.
The banana tree is growing a new leaf. I think this is very exciting, nearly as exciting as the glass floor in the Tower. I wouldn’t walk on it, and Mark jumped up and down and laughed. I keep going back to look at it, the banana leaf, not the glass floor in the Tower, obviously. It is a Miracle Of Nature, imagine having banana leaves here in Windermere.
Mark has dug over a part of the field to plant things that we can’t grow here, like carrots. This sounds all very splendid, but there are a lot of other creatures who like to eat carrots, and the other day we passed a field with half a dozen tragic little mole corpses hanging on the wire. This seemed to me to be very sad, although I remember we had one carrot harvest years ago where every single carrot had been completely scoffed below the surface, when we tugged them out of the ground, none of them were any longer than half an inch long, and the rest had gone to fatten up the mole population.
I do not know what we will do about the moles, it is going to be difficult enough to fence to keep the sheep and deer out. We have got lots of newly sprouted trees to plant in the field, but there is no point until we can acquire some fencing from somewhere, because deer are not stupid and will eat the very nicest things they can find.
I am in full agreement about this.
One day soon we will be eating home-grown mushrooms.
Have a picture of Lucy on our walk. You can see that there were other people around, if you look. It is very difficult to be solitary even here.
I do hope they don’t ban exercise. It would be terrible not to be able to walk, and worse for all those poor people in flats.
Also it would make for very traumatic relations with the dogs.
