Goodness, it is very quiet again this evening.
There is nobody here.
It is Hallowe’en, when usually Bowness would fill up with fancily-dressed revellers. These are mostly the rugby club and the football club, who like to take advantage of the annual opportunity to disguise themselves as unconvincing girls.
Tonight there is hardly a soul abroad, and it is so cold that even the girls are not convincingly disguised as girls.
Certainly I am not. Now that we are back in the north, all of my thermal underwear and extra layers of flannel shirts have been promptly restored.
I am wearing my sheepskin boots with the extra sheepskin insoles on the top of the sheepskin lining. I am wearing my vest and my cashmere socks and two jackets, and I am still cold.
So far I have had one customer, who predictably turned up just as I had poured a cup of tea and answered the phone to Number Two Daughter.
Number Two Daughter, just so you know, is fine. They have been out to dinner and eaten lots of nice things, including lobster. I did not ask how the lobster had been killed, because of not wishing to sound obsessive, but Number Two Daughter is a civilised humanitarian and so I am sure that she insisted on a swift and painless death.
I hate what people do to lobsters. We are wicked.
I might have mentioned this before.
I was pleased that Number Two Daughter was having a happy day, because when I spoke to Lucy this morning she most certainly was not.
She went out on a police night out last night and was not very well this morning. She sent me a mis-spelt text from the evening out assuring me of her well-being. I was not worried about her because nothing can possibly go wrong when you are with twenty other police officers.
They have to go somewhere which is a different police authority, because you cannot arrest yourselves if you get drunk and accidentally behave badly, and so Lucy was staying in an hotel. I do not know if it was nice or not, and it is quite possible that she didn’t either.
I am very glad that I am not twenty any more.
We did not have nearly such an exciting day. We have done quite enough waking up in strange places for one week, and it is very lovely indeed to be waking up in our own house again.
Obviously the camper van is almost our own house. It is even nicer in some ways, because when we wake up there we do not have to worry about housework or taxis or rural broadband, and there is not even a washing machine to be filled. We can wake up and shirk.
We woke up much earlier than usual this morning, because of the clocks changing, but we did not shirk. I stayed at home and hoovered and dusted whilst Mark went across to the the farm with the dogs.
He had gone to dig up some vegetables. His mother is going to come and visit us this week, bringing her friend who is a vegetarian, and so we will need vegetables. You cannot feed vegetarians on sausages, not even if they have been wrapped in bacon.
We will not need the vegetables until tomorrow, but he went to get them anyway, in a lull between two torrential downpours. It is sensible to take advantage of any good weather you can find just at the moment, there might not be any more before spring.
He brought home lots of black soil-encrusted vegetables, all of which needed to be scrubbed in the sink.
Note to young people. You have become very used to supermarkets doing this for you. I would just like to point out that you jolly well don’t know your good fortune. There was a lot of grit and a compost bin full of leaves, and also a few slugs. Supermarkets are ace.
He has grown golden beet and purple beet and some large potatoes. It was too early to pick the parsnips really but he brought some anyway. There were carrots and some parsley roots, which look like parsnips but apparently taste of parsley. I did not eat one so I don’t yet know if this is true.
Also there were the first Yucons, which look a bit like white sweet potatoes, and which taste a bit the same but have the texture of water chestnuts. There was a marrow, and of course we still have our own home-grown squashes and pumpkins.
I put the last bit in in case Elspeth reads this. She has been going on about pumpkins on Facebook.
We are not having a competition to see who is the most successful domestic mother but I am just making sure that I don’t lose.
Perish the thought.
