I am having a diary-writing failure.
It is long after eight in the evening and I am only just starting.
This is not because I have been busy. In fact I have been so completely un-busy that I ought to have written it three or four times by now.
Of course this is the thing about idleness and procrastination. Once you start it is very hard to stop.
What is more, we have been sitting idly on the taxi rank for hours and hours. Winter has descended overnight on the Lake District. The weather has become rubbish, with endless torrential rain, and nobody is here.
This is, we think, because they have all been frightened into a further spell of staying at home, this time not because of lurking diseases, but because it is no longer possible to get petrol.
Of course it is perfectly possible to get petrol here now, along with bread flour and loo roll and anything else people might want. Nevertheless the fearsome spectre of scarcity has been summoned, terrifyingly, mostly by the ever-admirable BBC, and now nobody is going to take the risk of emptying their whole fuel tank to come here and then being unable to get back home.
Twenty four hour media is a wonderful invention.
Hence there are no camper vans, no caravans, and no campers. Everybody who had picked the slightly-more-expensive flexible hotel dates on Booking.com has flexed them, and what we have left is a few poor unfortunates who could not wriggle out of it.
I do not envy them. Quite apart from the fuel worries, the weather is really ghastly at the moment.
Mark was not working today, because it is difficult to install sensitive electronic equipment outdoors during monsoon rainfall. Instead he kindly volunteered to take the dogs for their morning emptying in the park, so that I would not need to get wet. Needless to say I did not say: oh no, you couldn’t possibly, and he put his shorts and flip flops on underneath his big coat and an umbrella.
This was because legs and feet dry in moments in front of the fire, but wet trousers and boots take ages.
He came home laughing, because the dogs had not wanted to go for a walk at all. They had both rushed in through the park gate, obliged themselves on the grass, and then dashed back out again. They were most disgruntled to discover that they were expected to go and walk anyway, and once Mark turned round to make his way home, they both belted ahead down the road like a couple of miserably furry projectiles.
Their day deteriorated even further when I decided that since they were already smelly wet dogs, they could both have a bath.
I have just washed their cushion, and the rug that comes between them and the sofa, and just needed clean dogs to complete the set.
They were, as the lodger used to say, traumaed.
They had to be dragged up the stairs and prevented from escape attempts. Then they stood, resignedly, under the shower whilst I hosed them down and scrubbed them clean.
Afterwards they lay on their clean rug on the sofa and shivered self-pityingly, although it was perfectly warm because the fire was lit and the central heating running.
They were so traumaed they did not even beg for cheese when we had breakfast. They did not beg for anything. They curled up together in mutual sympathy and tucked their noses forlornly under their tails, and stayed there for the rest of the day.
Life can be so cruel to a little dog sometimes.
We did not spend the day sleeping on the sofa, although I would have liked to.
As you know, our beloved leaders are encouraging us to expect a winter of discontent.
I do not like being discontented, and also I can jolly well remember the last one. Our generation grew up in the days when ice on the inside of the windows was normal, and I do not have the smallest intention of repeating the experience. I remember all too well what it was like to sleep in a bed so cold that you did not want to move about and accidentally encounter a cold bit, and where in the morning you took your clothes in with you in order to warm them up a bit before putting them on.
We are not going to do that again, Boris can be discontented by himself if he likes. We might have all sorts of problems, but being cold is not going to be one of them.
Hence today Mark made a fresh start on his long-neglected hot water system.
I do not have the first idea what he is doing although he seems very optimistic about it.
Actually I do know what he is doing, just not why he is doing it. Today he installed a second heat exchanger, this one under the bathroom sink. He said that it would mix the hot and the cold water together so that it would come out lukewarm, and laughed, so I think am probably missing some vital bit of understanding.
Either way, it is looking promising.
We might have hot water in the washing machine before the winter.
How exciting.
