I would just like to open this with some sympathetic noises for the Number Two Daughters, who are having the very sad experience of their dog having reached the end of his short doggy life.
He has bone cancer and is fading fast.
Actually it is not exactly their dog. They do not have a dog completely of their own, because they are not yet permanent residents. It is a dog that they shared with their neighbours, and which they loved very much. It lived with Number Two Daughter all the time when she was drearily awaiting the Canadian Government to give her permission to work throughout a whole dull summertime.
Everybody else was at work except for Number Two Daughter and the dog, and they were best friends together. He was, as most dogs are, generally stupid and tiresome, but it was not his fault, because he had been rescued from people who treated him dreadfully badly, and he did not know that the world could be a kindly place.
He is dying now, a long way away from here in Canada, and I am sad, because his love has been a joyful thing for Number Two Daughter, and she will miss him.
They are going to be with him at the end next week.
He was a good boy.
Back here in England it has been a dreadfully chilly, inhospitable day, and even though it is only five in the afternoon, I am writing this now so that when Mark comes home we can eat an enormous dinner and I can go directly to bed with a clear conscience.
It is so terribly cold, with a cutting icy wind and bursts of sleety rain. I have seen the lodger today, and she is suffering dreadfully with her sore hand, which seems to hurt very much more in the cold. I do not have a sore hand, but I am nowhere near the clout-casting sort of behaviour in which we indulged last year, when the sun arrived early and we all sighed contentedly in its beneficent warmth.
I had some firewood to cut up this morning, and I put two jumpers on over my shirt and thermal underwear, and a padded shirt on top of that, and I was still cold.
I had to use Mark’s scary saw, which is more scary than usual as it needs a new blade after a couple of misfortunes with unexpected screws. I still have all of my fingers, however, which is always a bonus after cutting firewood. We had two brothers for neighbours in France, who operated the log splitter together, despite the fact that they used to drink a very great deal. One brother was partially sighted. This combination of perils had left the other one with three whole fingers on one hand and two on the other, the rest being a troubling array of stumps.
I have been piling the firewood on to the stove with unbridled enthusiasm. If I were Boris I would shut up for a while about my green-agenda plans to oblige every household to forgo their central heating and just put on extra jumpers. This is not at all the weather for that discussion. If he wants any kind of positive response from the population of the Lake District then he would be wise to keep quiet at least until July, by which time we will probably all have forgotten what cold toes feel like.
Of one thing I am absolutely certain, I will not be accepting his generous encouragement to go and indulge in outdoor drinking after Monday. I think perhaps he has not been this far north so early in the year. I cannot imagine anything nice at all about al-fresco beer watered down with freezing rain, and I suspect that wherever Boris has ear-marked for the much-anticipated pint that he was going on about on Facebook, it will not be here.
I suppose it could be worse. When we lived in France, near the fingerless neighbours, we had an outside loo for ages. Few things are less nice than needing a midnight wee in January when the temperature has fallen to minus fourteen. I recall putting my overcoat and boots on to tiptoe down the path at the side of the house, with the overhanging trees showering icicles down my neck, to discover the loo seat was a frozen lump of ice and there was a mound of snow on the top of the toilet roll.
In the end, today’s cold snap has turned out to be rather splendid. After I had finished sawing and stacking the firewood, and once dinner was safely prepared, I put a story to play on my telephone and sat by the fire to sew.
Oliver has got to go back to school soon, and things need to be labelled, which turned out to be the loveliest excuse for a warm shirk.
Summertime is lovely, but it is nice to have a blazing log fire.
Have a picture of a good boy.
