Interrupted

There are a very lot of people in the Lake District.

They are the sort of people who would usually be in Magaluf. This will change next week when we get the sort of people who would usually be in France. The two are different, as I am sure you can imagine.

I do not know that I would want to come here on a day like today. I think I would probably rather wait until it rained. Nobody comes just for the day when it rains, and so I would not need to queue for twenty minutes outside the ice cream shop, breathing in exhaust fumes and listening to the rural sounds of yelling children and motorbike engines.

We used to have a fun fair in Bowness in the summer, but it is not here this year, presumably because somebody thinks you might catch bat flu from candy floss and dodgems.

I suppose that I am not really surprised about this, because part of the joy of fun fairs was always that they were not exactly sanitary sort of places. They were places of dodgy hot dogs and a slight whiff of rats in the background.

I liked them like this. I liked the faintly lawless air that hung over the candy floss and the shooting ranges, and had a vague childhood ambition to grow up into one of those fat fortune-telling ladies with too much lipstick in a tasseled booth, bedecked with antimacassars and pictures of the famous.

I could have married one of the suntanned men with gold teeth and earrings who swing between the cars on the Waltzers.

I wonder if they sing Abba’s Greatest Hits whilst they wash their hands.

Funfairs may not be examples of fastidious cleanliness.

Just to make the point even plainer, a rash of signs have appeared along the lake shore, in big red and black letters, telling people that No Hawkers, No Street Traders And No Buskers are allowed any more.

That translates into No Balloons, No Sticky Sweeties, No Brightly Coloured Tat, and Nobody Pretending To Be A Statue.

I like all of these things. They are all the things that make being on holiday so splendidly lovely. and am sorry that somebody in the council thinks that they pose some sort of plague threat.

I do not at all like the thought that all of these mildly unsavoury activities might never return.

I wrote those words ages and ages ago, and have been busy ever since.

Not exactly non-stop busy, but the sort of busy where it isn’t really worth digging the computer out to write something, because very probably somebody will be along in a few minutes.

Number Two Daughter telephoned in the middle of it to tell me that Mrs. Number Two Daughter has got her cannabis-testing job.

I am very impressed with this.

It is always good to have a family member with actual legitimate employment, although I am prepared to concede that ‘cannabis tester’ is not quite the same as ‘policeman’ when you are dropping it into conversation to try and impress your middle-class friends. However she has not only got a real job, she has managed to do it in a foreign country during an outbreak of plague, and I think this is a laudable achievement, and more than I have ever managed myself.

It is no good. I am going to have to stop writing. I have been interrupted lots and lots of times. This is not always by customers. Sometimes it has been people just wanting me to tell them what pub they should visit for a nice time. I have never got any idea what the answer is to this, because of not really going to pubs, so I just try and work out how scruffy or otherwise they are and send them t the corresponding hostelry.

I have had enough of being interrupted.

I will try again tomorrow.

Have a picture hastily taken out of the car window from work this evening.