I do not think I am going to write this for very long, because I want to sit in the sun and read.
Somehow today it just seems too difficult to be creative.
I thought I might paint a No Parking notice on the dustbin, to stop tiresome people in the holiday houses parking in the space at the back of our house, which by common local consent is generally reserved for us. I have not done it, but nevertheless feel that just the contemplation of this project has fully exercised my creativity for one day and I ought to allow myself to stop.
In fact I have had a very prosaic and mundane sort of a day. I have done nothing of exciting note whatsoever. Indeed I have not done most of the things that I should have done either. This is because I did not get sufficient sleep over the weekend, and my brain is now foggy and unresponsive. I have kept trying to interest it in domestic activities, but it is having none of it. Stick to hanging the washing out, it suggested. You can probably manage that without too much mental agility.
I did not even manage that very well. I have started ploughing through the bottomless swamp of Oliver’s post-school laundry, and it has proved something of a challenge to get it dry.
Fortunately the sun came out this afternoon, and I could peg it all in the back yard. I think I am probably the only person in Windermere today who has a washing line festooned with a dozen sets of thermal underwear. This, as you know, is because of Scotland still being in the middle of what appears to be their ski season.
There was the thermal underwear and also his bed linen, which is bright red, and rather startling. We chose red for his linens in order that he can find them all when the Gordonstoun laundry dumps them, unceremoniously, back into the entrance hall of Duffus House every week. Sixty sets of white sheets do not make it easy to find one’s own. We bought Oliver red bed linen, so that he could identify it easily, and I imagine that now everybody else’s sheets are pink as a result.
Hence today I did a light load of washing, a dark load, and a red load. I would have mixed up the red with the dark load, but Lucy’s police uniform is in it, and I did not want the white trim to become pink. This would not have helped her authoritative gravitas.
Lucy arrived home at lunchtime. She set off when she had finished work late last night, but stopped on the way home to sleep by the wayside in her newly modified camper van car. With blackout curtains at the windows and a comfortable bed, she intended to snooze for an hour, but finished up sleeping like the dead until long into the morning.
It is lovely to see her. She is staying with us for two weeks, and her friend from school is arriving this afternoon to spend a couple of nights here as well. I do not think that I have met her friend, although it is perfectly possible that I have, because Lucy’s school friends all seemed to me to be completely interchangeable. They were uniformly blonde and giggly with upper-class accents and hockey sticks. When we went to school to collect her it was always something of a challenge to identify which one in the milling throng was actually Lucy. I think we finished up with the right one in the end, but it could have been a close-run thing.
I listened to stories of policing over-excited football supporters, and of confirming Sudden Deaths, presumably with a surreptitious poke in the ribs, which all made me laugh. She is doing jolly well.
She is home for two weeks.
We think we will have to have a holiday whilst she is here.
It is going to be lovely.
I haven’t taken a photograph. Have another one of Scotland.
