Roger Poopy is in love.
He has spent a lot of sociable time with his friend Pippa, the black Labrador, lately. He went to a VE Day party at her house on Friday, and yesterday she popped in to our house to say hello and borrow a chisel.
Today we got up late, and did not see her on our walk. He rushed about hopefully, dashing off after other dogs in the distance in the hope that one of them might turn out to be her, but it never was.
He has been standing hopefully at the gate ever since, making little whimpery noises.
When they are together he will do anything to get her attention. The other day he stole her bone whilst she was lying on the garden path. She did not seem to mind this very much, so he walked backwards and forwards past the gateway until eventually she noticed and rushed after him. A short, but nevertheless passionate struggle followed, which concluded with some joyous dashing about and barking.
She is a girl after his own heart.
He is lying at my feet as I write, sighing occasionally and feeling sad. He has even declined to eat any dinner.
We will be up in time for the morning dog rendezvous tomorrow. He will just have to pine until then.
Everything here is doing brilliantly well. I attach a picture of the pumpkin plant, which is just doing magnificently. If we sit still and watch we can actually see the tendrils moving as they search back and forth for something to hold on to.
We watched them, captivated, whilst we were having breakfast this morning. Once they found the wire mesh, they caught hold of it and then pulled the plant closer and closer to it by becoming a tight spiral, like a coiled spring, so that it is so much easier for the next tendrils to find it.
You can tell that lockdown is upon us. We have been terrifically excited by watching the plants grow.
We have not only been watching the plants grow. I have got Vibration Whitefinger from several days with the sander, so today Mark took over the sanding whilst I went to paint the bedroom ceiling.
It was disgusting. Our bedroom gets very black from the endless slow-moving tourist traffic which chugs through Windermere, and it was, indeed, black. The walls around the window were the worst. In the corner where the wardrobe had been you could see blackened ghost outlines of everything that had been on the top.
The ceiling paint that we have got is the same colour as the one I am painting over. I dragged the bed over to the side of the room and painted half of the ceiling. It took three coats.
Three coats, and I had wiped the worst bits.
I shoved the bed back and painted the other half of the ceiling. Actually I painted some of it, because by then I was bored with painting ceilings. I have got a very short attention span for things that involve waving your arm over your head and hopping on and off a stool, so I went to see how Mark was getting on with the wardrobe in the back yard.
I was half expecting to find him stuck underneath it, but he wasn’t, only he said that he was getting Vibration Whitefinger as well.
We decided to stop and have an early dinner. This sounds more idle than it actually was, because it was almost seven o’clock.
Mark made pasta. I was excused from this activity, because the children rang, one after another, so I sat and drank wine and chatted to them instead.
Oliver joined us for dinner. We do not watch television very often, because of not having the usual sort of television. We do have Netflix, however, and whilst we have been in lockdown we have been watching our way through Fawlty Towers.
This is especially a joy, because it is new to Oliver, who thinks that the nineteen seventies are unimaginably ancient history, but he finds it as funny as we do.
We laughed until our faces hurt. It was the episode about the Germans tonight.
We are having the happiest lockdown. Nineteen seventies comedy and watching the plants grow.
What more could anybody want?
