The sun is shining on Windermere for the bank holiday.
It is very quiet. I have just had a little walk to Sainsbury’s, and there is not a soul to be seen anywhere.
This feels both like a wonderful thing and a dreadful thing. Of course it is magnificent to think that nobody is going to catch Bat Flu because of accidentally bumping into some inadvertent coughing person, but also it is unspeakably sad to think of people trapped in their houses and not able to come to the Lake District.
This thought made me feel a bit tearful again, perhaps I have got hormones.
Mark took my car out this evening to check that the brakes were working properly. It will need to have properly working brakes, even if we do not have MOT certificates any more, and we are not earning a living in the transport industry. It needs to be at its clapped-out-taxi finest, because although my NHS volunteer app has not beeped its siren call yet, sooner or later it will, and I want to be ready to leap instantly into action.
He said that the ducks have taken over Bowness, and are waddling about in the road with complete insouciance, because there is no traffic any more. It was a good job that the brakes were working, because he was obliged to stop rather suddenly and wait for a goose. The goose did not seem to feel that it had any duty to get out of the way, and stood there as crossly as if it were paying the highest rate of council tax and thought taxis were a symptom of social degeneracy.
This upsurge in wildlife might prove to be useful information if it turns out that the Government do not come good on their promise of help to the self-employed. Goose is pretty good to eat even if it is not Christmas, you have to put it just on the oven shelf and put the tray on the shelf below so that you can use the fat for pastry all the way through January.
Bank holiday or not, locked down plague pandemic or not, some things do not change. Like it or not, and in the case of our entire family, the case is most emphatically not, Monday has been cleaning day.
We have cleaned. The children did their floor, I did the middle floor, and Mark sloped off and changed the brake pads on my car. This was not exactly cleaning, but he did not want to do it, so it counted in just the same way. Nobody cleaned the kitchen, because it was just too difficult, and we all pretended the top floor did not exist.
I do not like cleaning at all, but it is over for another week, hurrah.
The day was not entirely horrible. Lucy and I took the dogs for our Daily Exercise ramble through the woods this morning and talked about her plans for going back to work.
She will be leaving at the end of this week, going back to Northamptonshire where she will be starting to be a real, out on the streets policeman, arresting people for going to the supermarket too often, or whatever the Government has told them that they are supposed to do now that we have our brave new world.
Very soon our household will be back to three again.
I have planted some lettuce and tomatoes in a pot for her to take back. If she remembers to water them then she will have salads all through the summer, although I am not holding my breath. I do not think I would have remembered to water tomatoes when I was nineteen.
We are going to go shopping, maybe tomorrow, and replenish our cupboards and hers.
It is a sign of the times that I am feeling a bubble of excitement and anxiety about this adventure.
Have a picture of the conservatory.
