We are at home.
As always, it is a bit sad not to be in the camper van any more, but wonderful to be back at home. The conservatory has turned into a jungle in our absence. Even though it is ten o’clock at night and dark, it is tropically hot in there, and everything is enormous, and just a tiny bit disturbing. There is a spider living in the corner over the top of the lemon geranium, I expect it has become a fearsome tarantula whilst we have been away.
It has been an ace day. We were woken up in the night by rain so hard that it rattled the camper, but the day dawned fresh and bright.
We chucked the dogs outside and sat with the door open even though we were still in bed without any clothes on. The sheep have been moved, so there were not even any sheep to gaze at us, and we breathed in the cool morning air along with our coffee.
We were under the duvet, and so it would not have mattered if somebody had been walking past. It is not that warm in the Lake District.
Mark could not spend the entire day hanging about at the camper van, because he had got to go to the dentist. We had brought his taxi with us, for that very purpose, and for transporting anything too oily or otherwise grubby to be allowed in the camper van.
He took the washing to chuck into the machine at home, and buzzed off.
This left me to get on with the painting by myself. The dogs loafed about in the sun, and I painted the pretend stone arches on the wardrobe door, which occupied me very nicely until Mark came home, and once we had pegged the washing out, we had wine and salmon and some gorgeously creamy blue cheese for breakfast.
Afterwards he faffed about doing garden things, until a motorbike zoomed up the road and turned in up the field. This turned out to be his friend Steve, who also has a camper van, and who had popped in to be sociable.
The kettle had hardly boiled when another motorbike buzzed along the road. The rider turned out to be another friend of theirs. He saw the little gathering, and stopped to join in.
I made the cups of tea and retreated into the camper van to paint, because although I like Mark’s friends very much, mostly they like to talk about engines, and it is easier if they do not feel obliged to try and include me in the conversation. I listened a bit anyway, but they were going on about bulkheads, and V8 engines, and Series Two Landrovers, which made Mark look happy, although it was entirely incomprehensible.
In the end, of course they had got to go, and I had finished my painting. Mark crawled underneath the camper and fastened the loose exhaust back on, and I did my exciting job of the day.
Mark had gone to the sheet shop in Barrow when he passed it at work this week, and bought a full set of sheets for the camper van.
They are soft, and white, and fresh, and today I put them on our bed.
I pulled the old ones off with some regret, they have been the camper van sheets for fifteen years. The bottom sheet had worn so thin that it is not even fit to be given a reincarnation as dishcloths. It will have to skip that stage and jump straight to becoming a single-use dog-sick cloth.
It might be called into use sooner than expected.
Whilst Mark was under the camper van, Roger Poopy came trotting up dragging something disgusting in his mouth. He would not bring it close, but his a little way off, so Mark went to investigate.
It was the awful carcass of a long-dead lamb.
There was not a very great deal left of it, clearly crows and foxes had done their work. All the same, Roger Poopy was very pleased with it, and terribly disappointed when Mark made him leave it alone. He kept going back to it, and trying to smuggle it closer and closer to the van when we were not looking, presumably so that he could hide it in the dog-cave under our bed where I expect he thought that we would never ever guess it was there.
We did not think that would be very nice to discover in a couple of weeks time, especially if the sun had been shining warmly on the van in our absence, so before we came home Mark took it off him and buried it.
He was very forlorn about this.
It is, as they say, a dog’s life.
Poor Roger Poopy.
