Change in rhythm

I am going to hurry up and get this written quickly this evening.

It has been an uneventful sort of day, and in any case, I am longing to get back to my book.

It is called Behind The Scenes At The Museum, and it is one of the set books for my course. It is so splendid that I can hardly bear to put it down.

It is that glorious sort of book where you are warned in advance about any misadventures, so that there is nothing to worry about, and you can just enjoy the reading without needing to turn the pages ahead to try and find out what happens next. Eventually you discover that there is one huge misadventure, saved to the last handful of chapters, which makes perfect sense of all the rest. It is satisfactory in the extreme.

Alas, I have now reached the final misadventure, which happens just at the sad moment where the right hand side of the book is becoming very thin. I am reading slowly and carefully to make it last.

The possibility of really, truly enjoying the set books had not even remotely occurred to me. I was expecting that they would all be Cold Comfort Farm, or similar terrible tedious misery, and so far they have been a serendipity beyond all my expectations. I am now surveying my small pile of still-unread set books with great joy, what happinesses lie ahead.

I haven’t even finished buying them all yet.

Obviously I have not occupied my day in reading, what wickedness that would have been. In fact when Mark went off to work I put on flip-flops instead of boots and the dogs and I went off up the fell, in the hope that I would be thinner when I came down, which I wasn’t.

It was actually a jolly good walk, and apart from the cold, it was rather nice to be able to splash indifferently through the torrents of water roaring down all the footpaths without worrying about wet boots. It has rained a very great deal lately, and is still raining now.

All the same, it was good to get out and breathe in the clean air and feel the cold wind on my face. There was an unexpected blackbird in full song, and an awful lot of blackberries still left. I did not pick any, because I did not have a bag, and anyway, everybody knows that the devil spat on them last week.

There were lots of sheep, and the dogs stuck anxiously to my heels in case they might accidentally do something villainous, you can never be too sure with sheep, and we walked safely through a field of cows. Their reassuring green smell made me wistful for my own days of cow-ownership, and I was longing to stop and scratch some furry noses, but did not, in case the noses’ owners took exception to the dogs.

Coming home meant bringing in firewood to stack by the fire for the first time this year. Mark swept the chimney a couple of weeks ago, and has brought in a couple of loads of wood, but it is the first time I have done it, and it was the very beginning of the winter rhythm, restarted as if it had never ceased.

I filled one side of the fire with all of the dry wood, and the other with the chilly, slightly damp wood from outside. It has been drying there all summer, and we are just about as well-stocked for winter as we have ever been. It is a safe sort of feeling, to be in our warm house, and know that all will be well for months and months to come.

I swept the floors then, and tidied round, feeling comfortably nesty. Then to my happiness Elspeth called, and announced she was coming for coffee.

There is nothing nicer than a friend coming round after you have tidied up. Before is nice as well, but not quite as smug.

We had tea in the conservatory and listened to the rain, until she had to go and I had to work, which is where I am now.

So now you know.

I am going to go away and read my book.