Hedonists

The Global Warming heatwave has come. It is actually upon us.

The sun has beaten down on the Lake District all day long, making the pavements hot and the air oven-dry.

I have got the great good fortune not to be living in a squalid flat in central London without air conditioning or a balcony, and so we have enjoyed it very much. I am now so tired that I can hardly write.

We have been wicked and irresponsible and have not earned a bean.

It has been absolutely glorious.

My parents came to see us.

Of course we have got Lucy visiting us at the moment, and it is my father’s birthday this week, so we all took a day off, and they chugged up the motorway in the baking sunshine to have an actual person-to-person visit.

I do not think we would have hugged each other even if it was allowed. It is too hot for that.

We knew they were coming and so we got up early and flapped about.

Actually I flapped about. Everybody else wandered about a bit absently in the scorching heat, doing helpful things , and in Oliver’s case, sloping off every now and again whenever he wasn’t actually being given something important to do.

I told him to cut the lawn and trim the flowerbed back so that people could actually get up the path to the front door. These had become horribly overgrown, and took him ages. We have had a summer of alternate sunshine and heavy rains, and the front garden has become an unsupervised jungle. The postman has beaten a regular path to the front door, but apart from that it has been neglected, and it was potentially impassable.  In the event this turned out not to matter very much, because they came in at the back.

We put Hamilton on the music player, loudly, so that we could all sing along, also loudly. Lucy helped me to cook, and Mark was told to tidy up. This led to a domestic half an hour later when I discovered that he had interpreted this as ‘how lovely it would be if you tidied up your shed’.

In fact nothing could have been further from the truth, and he was shepherded back inside to shove the hoover about.

Lucy and I cooked chicken and ham, and some potatoes in a tomato sauce, and some sweet potatoes in butter and garlic and paprika. These last turned out brilliantly and I could have just eaten them and nothing else, although obviously I was more polite than that.

We iced the birthday cake and made interesting dips, and sliced some carrots and celery to poke into them.

You will not be at all surprised to learn that none of us ate the carrots and celery. We ate crisps and buttery bread, and dipped those into the interesting dips instead.

The dips were nice anyway. We made hummus and mayonnaise and guacamole and I unearthed some home-made chutney from the back of the fridge.

We made a healthy jug of water with lemon and cucumber and mint, and an unhealthy jug of lemonade with raspberries and blackberries and mint, with a dash of Passionfruit Malibu. Guess which one was still untouched at the end of the day.

We had to drink it later. We put some Malibu in that as well then, to see if it would help, but it didn’t.

We sat in the leafy shade of the conservatory and had a lovely afternoon, eating in the glorious sunshine. My father told us stories of his rascally childhood, and Lucy told us about being in the police, and Oliver told us about being at boarding school, and I couldn’t think of anything at all to say, so I just listened and laughed occasionally, more often as I drank more of the lemonade. Then my parents had to go, having first been dragged all over the house and obliged politely to admire all of our lockdown DIY.

This is an important thing that you have to do when you are a parent. Remember this when you take the all-important decision not to use birth control. Fifty years later you will be standing politely listening to boring and incomprehensible stories about different mixes of plaster.

They escaped in the end. We waved them off reluctantly, and thought how hot and sticky it was.

After that it was a very short mental leap to imagine something better to do.

We packed all the leftover dinner into the camper van and went off to the tarn to swim in the soft evening sunshine.

It was magnificent.

It was midweek, so there was almost nobody there, except for a couple of chaps skinny-dipping, and a portly family who looked as though they might be from Barrow. The lake was cool, because it had rained so much last night. We sank into it with the utmost relief, and wallowed comfortably as the sun sank lower and lower in the sky.

Even Roger Poopy swam, which is a huge achievement, because he is terrified of the water. After a few minutes’ dashing about on the bank yelping after us as we swam off into the distance, he took the plunge and joined us, and actually, because he is so very fit, he swam brilliantly. He did not help matters by getting worried and thinking that he might like a cuddle a couple of times, when we were right in the middle, and we have all got dog scratches where he carried on paddling frantically even though he was right on top of us.

His father stayed on the bank and hid behind a tree when we tried to encourage him to join us.

It was still so hot that there was no cooling breeze even when we got out of the water, and we dried on the bank and swam again.

In the end we strolled happily back down through the cool woods, and ate leftover chicken and dips in the camper van.

We still didn’t eat the celery, because we still had bread and crisps. I will have to put it in something laden with butter and garlic tomorrow.

We thought that we might not go home, that we would be massively irresponsible and idle and just stay out and to hell with the consequences, but Ted rang up and said that the storm had wiped out half of Cumbria’s broadband, so we knew Mark would have to work tomorrow, and with the utmost reluctance we had to pack up and trail home.

It was dark when we got back.

Oliver went straight into the shower and to bed, and Lucy and Mark retreated to the conservatory to drink wine sleepily.

I have been writing to you, but my eyes will no longer stay open.

Goodnight.

The picture is my parents having their compulsory guided tour. Oliver took it, because he had not been drinking the Malibu.