It is damp, and chilled in Windermere, but the world is bright with colours of autumn.
I am on the taxi rank, and since it is not yet dark I can still see the trees leaning and swaying in the wind. The lake is grey and flecked with white, and I am very glad that I am not a duck. It looks terribly cold.
Geese have been flapping past, noisily, all afternoon, although they seem to be going north not south, so either I have not been paying attention to the migration patterns of geese or they are a particularly maverick strain. There is another rainbow curving over the trees but I do not think it is worth going to hunt for the pot of gold, handy as it might be.
Apart from emptying the dogs I have not really been outside very much at all today, mostly because I do not have the sort of disposition which is inclined to do hearty things in outbursts of inclement weather. We had not set the alarm properly, and we overslept, which made the morning a bit of a rush. Once Mark had gone I got very wet indeed on the morning amble around the park with the Peppers, and resolved not to go too far from the hearth for the rest of the day.
Roger Poopy’s father had to be carried to the park, although he managed to limp around it, zig zagging from one interesting puddle of wee to the next. He is getting very doddery. Also it is boring to stand around in the pouring rain, waiting whilst an ancient dog creaks after you on three legs. I have got a large hat which I wear on wet days, and this helps, but all of the bits of me that were not underneath the hat got very wet.
When I got home and peeled everything off I was pleased to discover that the muddy paw marks on my coat had been rinsed away. These were left over from when Roger Poopy wished to dispute the ownership of a tennis ball a couple of days ago, and had made me think guiltily that a true member of the middle classes would wash their coat, or even better, send it to be dry cleaned, but now the problem has solved itself. Every cloud etc.
My job of the day was to empty the new living room.
The new carpet is coming tomorrow.
You cannot put a carpet down in a space which is filled with clutter.
Over the last few weeks it seems to have become populated with a variety of homeless junk, mostly related to Mark.
A great number of his spanners and screwdrivers and hammers seem to have migrated out of his shed into the new living room.
This is not by any means the way that we intend to proceed. Spanners are no longer welcome in the living room from this day forth.
Nothing is welcome in a living room that is holding its breath for the imminent arrival of a carpet, and so I emptied it.
I dragged everything out and made a teetering pile in the conservatory.
This was mildly alarming, and also upset the dogs, who are allowed on the sofa in the conservatory as long as it has got a cover on it. They were troubled to find that even the cover had disappeared underneath four arm chairs and a broken coffee table, with a couple of wobbly dining chairs balanced on the top.
I shoved the stack a couple of times, but it seemed to be fairly stable. I did not think it would stand up to a collision with Pepper, who is an enthusiast of the most lollopy kind, but she was off doing dog things elsewhere, and so it would be fine until tomorrow.
Probably.
After that I sat on the newly-emptied floor for ages scraping off the splattered plaster and cement. If you are going to put a carpet on the floor it is sensible to make the floor smooth first, so I did, and then I swept it.
I had to sweep it several times, because the dust flew in the air and then just landed again, but in the end it was fairly clean. Regrettably when Mark came home he sawed up some more bits of cork on it, so that was the end of that, but it has the potential for cleanness, and we can always run the hoover over it in the morning.
I had an hour left before I went to work, so I thought I would make biscuits. This turned out to be a monumental underestimate of the time involved in making biscuits. Unsurprisingly I was shockingly late for work and in a dreadful clumsy flap, and in a moment of careless haste, dropped a box full of cheese on the top of a tray of raspberry and hazelnut biscuits which had just been coated in melted chocolate.
This made me swear terribly and took ages to clear up.
I was not sorry to go to work, where I could sit quietly and drink chai.
I looked out at the lake and thought I would write to you.
Have a picture of the Lake District.
