I am wearing my new pink dungarees.
They are not very new. They were a birthday present, which was July, which practically feels like a long-ago other life belonging to somebody else. Somebody with more cash and stronger muscles.
Despite this we have had a warm summer and so it is the first time I have worn them.
They are truly lovely.
They are made to a design loosely based on the principle of a pink corduroy sack, which is how I like my clothes, but they are a gentler and more stylish sack than my dresses, and so Mark does not mind them very much.
I think they are beautiful. They are soft and comfortable, and whilst I was in Kendal today somebody stopped and said to me how lovely they looked.
Nobody has ever said that about anything else I have ever worn ever, I think, and so I was very surprised and pleased.
I was in Kendal to get my hair cut, which I have done now, and which also feels brilliant. It is short and tidy and entirely minimalist. I could probably have done something similar myself with the dog clippers, except it would not have been as nicely styled. I like having short hair, and am very glad I have grown past the stage of wanting it to waft about in a long and romantically soft-focus sort of way. This looks pretty but makes a shocking nuisance in the plug hole of the bath.
It was interesting to visit the hairdresser. We speculated, and you are welcome to join in this contemplative exercise, about whether or not Nicola Sturgeon wears a wig. Her hair has stayed entirely unchanged during the entire pandemic, unlike that of Boris, which was beginning to look as though it could be clipped into a fleece and spun into knitting wool by the end.
Answers on a postcard please.
In other news, I spent far too much of the morning trying to reinstate our Vodafone contract, which I will not talk about here because it still makes me cross just to think about it. We have been shockingly and deliberately overcharged and there is nothing I can do. Vodafone, or more accurately, One Com, are wicked thieves and I do not like them any more, not that I liked them much in the first place.
I will tell you anyway. Our contract was due to end in September, and I know this because I rang them in May to check. They put the prices up by seventy pounds a month two months before the contract finished, because apparently this is what they do.
I tried to ring them to sort it out when I had bat flu, but I had bat flu and it kept going wrong because I could not explain because of the high temperature. They charged me another seventy pounds then as well.
I told them that they were loathsome individuals but since they still offered the cheapest contract I did not take my business elsewhere as I would have liked to do, and merely seethed, angrily.
The plus point is that they answer the phone straight away, do not put you on hold for hours, and actually ring you back when they say that they will, so they might not be entirely black-hearted.
All the same, they are rotters.
On a cheery note, some of you might have spotted Number One Daughter on Facebook. She has just won a competition to see who is the fittest woman in the British Army. This is called Warrior Fitness, which I think is a splendidly exciting description, bringing to mind suits of armour and people having their knees smashed up by spiky iron balls swung from sticks.
Obviously I am very pleased and proud about this, although not in the smallest bit surprised. Indeed, I would have been astonished if some other soldier had won, we all know that the rest of the British Army is not nearly as fit as Number One Daughter.
I cannot let the side down and have resolved to get a bit fitter myself. I am going to go for a gentle walk around the Library Gardens when I get home. That should be a good start.
I have attached a photograph, I think. I have become somewhat technically incompetent recently, partly due to telephone problems which might now be improved now that I have achieved a truce with One Com.
