Goodness, I have been busy.
I am in the taxi rank and I have had such a thrilling evening. I have made twenty five whole pounds.
It is a good job that I have done this, because I have been monumentally rubbish at everything else.
First things first, however.
You might be interested to hear that the three villains in the endless dragging court case have today been sentenced. They have all gone to prison, and I have attached a picture of a newspaper article which will tell you some of the details.
I am both relieved, and sad. Prison is not a good thing to happen to anybody, but they did horrible things, and made it worse with horrible lies. The sadness and distress that they have caused will not be fixed by sending them to prison, but it helps their victim, who is my friend, and whose life has been lived in the shadow of their thoughtless unkindness. She can know now that she was not responsible for their dark acts, and perhaps it will mean that none of them ever do it again to anybody else. It is the end of that part of her story, and she can try and build herself a life which is free of them, if not of their scars.
Today has not gone quite the way that it should.
It was such a beautiful morning that instead of rushing round doing virtuous housewifely things, I took the dogs for a long walk up the fell. They charged about and barked at things, and I breathed in fresh air and listened to the blackbirds, and thought about the story that I am trying to write.
I have been trying to write another story. I have not written very much so far, but it is occupying a very great deal of my contemplative moments. It is not a story for children, so I will never become JK Rowling, but maybe one day I will finish it, and perhaps become somebody a bit less famous, like GK Chesterton.
I thought that I would try and write some of it when I got home, but when I got home I recalled that we were having a drought disaster in the conservatory, and that I had responsibilities which summoned my attention.
We installed the automatic watering system because I was fed up with having to splash around with a watering can. The idea was to save time, and that with a mere flick of a switch, water would gush forth in a controlled sort of manner, sprinkling and spraying judiciously on to the nicely dampened earth, exactly as and when it was needed.
So far I have spent hours and hours and hours messing about with the stupid thing, and the results have included at least two floods.
One of the two was today.
The outside tank was dry, so I needed to attach a hose from the kitchen tap, to the pipe that ran into the system and then turn it on.
You would not think that such a simple challenge could cause so much mess.
By the time I had finished we were all drenched, including me, the floor, the flower beds, the sofa and the dogs.
The dogs do not much like unexpected cold showers, and were not at all impressed.
It took me ages to connect the hose, because of rubber fittings being impervious to brute force when applied by elderly ladies, so in the end I warmed the fitting up with the kitchen lighter. The fitting smoked horribly and then burned my fingers. Once I managed to fasten it to the tap, and then after I stopped it spurting out in exciting jets that drenched the ceiling, the next problem was that tap water is at a far higher pressure than tank water with an old caravan pump. I turned it on to just the merest trickle, and to my surprise, water instantly exploded out of everywhere, blowing the ends off all of the drippers and the sprayers and the little joint bits.
Most of the now-leaking joints were hidden, buried underneath moss and bark. I had to unwrap the chicken wire and dismantle bits of arch whilst I tried to find the various ends of the pipe so that I could reattach bits.
I will not bore you with the details, most of which involve water being in unexpectedly wrong places, like running down my sleeve and soaking my underwear, or squirting out of loose bits of pipe, which then thrashed around like the death throes of snakes after an electric shock. Suffice to say that I added a new bit into the system and fell off the ledge into the flower bed, and drenched the entire conservatory with water, interspersed with muddy footprints squelching out of the flower bed.
By the time I had finished it was almost two in the afternoon, and by the time I had finished clearing up it was even later.
I was still desperate to add the bit that I had been thinking about to the story, so I belted upstairs and wrote it before I had completely forgotten it.
Obviously after that I was late for work.
I sloshed some tea into the flask and dashed off, realising when I got to the taxi rank that I had forgotten to make any dinner for when Mark came home, but after a while he rang to tell me that he would not be coming back until at least ten, and he would not mind eating pasta again, so that was all right.
I have rushed back home to light the fire, because we have got central heating again, and now I am sitting here waiting for bountiful strangers to drop cash into my pockets.
I like very much being back at work.
