Might not be a twerp after all

As it turned out, Lucy’s departure did not go exactly as planned.

She got up early, so that she could say goodbye to Mark before he went to work, and then floated about having a shower and organising her life into carrier bags before she set off.

I emptied the dogs and worried about what she might eat next week when she is working nights and might not organise nutritious satisfying meals inserted of crisps and chocolate and energy drinks. These seem to be a compulsory part of a policeman’s diet.

In the end we loaded her car and I wondered if she might just come to the cash and carry with me and bring me back in her car, because of needing a sack of flour.

The cash and carry was dreadfully empty.

It is a wonderful, massive warehouse right in the middle of Windermere. It is full of amazing unusual stuff, and every master chef for miles does his shopping there, and it is my diary so I can be sexist if I like. In any case they all seem to be men, there are no mistress chefs to my knowledge, and most of them shout a lot and drink too much.

There are a lot of upmarket hotels in the Lake District, and so it is both brilliantly well stocked and conveniently on the doorstep. It is so close that I could quite easily have walked home with a sack of flour, although obviously I preferred not to, not least because it was snowing.

There was nobody in the cash and carry at all, and the laden shelves were practically groaning under the weight of things that should have been sold for New Year festivities, and for January Special Offers, and for Wedding Fayres and Valentines Day. There were herbs and after dinner mints and boxes of individual milk cartons for bedrooms, and dried strawberries and little pastry cases for canapés, and every different kind of olive imaginable.

Nobody is going to buy any of it.

It was a bit grim.

We loaded the flour into the car and as we drove back I realised that Lucy’s brakes were making a troubling grinding noise. We tried them several times, and there was no question of it, it was brake pads.

We rang Mark.

Then we rang Autoparts.

Mark had to come home.

You cannot set off on a four hour journey down the motorway in the snow if your brakes are not very good, most especially not if you are a police officer.

Autoparts delivered the brake pads and Mark came home and fitted them.

This was awful because of course it meant that he had only spent half of the day at work, and he has just had ages and ages off at Christmas, so we have already picked everything off the money tree.

In the meantime the snow tumbled down, picturesquely.

It was after four in the afternoon when she set off, with exhortations from me to call when she got home, and reminders from Mark that you can drive as fast as you like in the snow but can’t then stop or turn. Then we sighed deeply and turned back to our lives.

I was supposed to take down the Christmas tree, but somehow when it came to it I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I do not know why I felt like this, usually when we get into January I am getting fed up of the extra clutter and the needles everywhere, and am longing to clean and polish the depths of winter away.

This year I looked at it and knew that I did not want to lose it just quite yet. I am almost ready to start filling seed trays and planting things, but somehow not quite.

Mark went to cut firewood in the dark, and I pinned my apron together, and then Elspeth rang to tell me that our local MP had Asked Questions In Parliament about what the Chancellor was doing to help taxi drivers. She had noticed because he also asked about outdoor centres, and she has got one of these.

I was very impressed indeed, although obviously the Chancellor will ignore him as thoroughly as I am ignoring the rat in the garden, which I am hoping will just go away by itself.

I was sorry then that I had called him a twerp so often, even though he probably only did it because he had got a taxi to the station and been buttonholed by the driver.

All the same it is nice to feel that he has made the effort.

I shall write to him and say so.

Lucy got home all right.

Have a picture of the children.