I have spent the entire day writing an assignment.
Well, not quite the entire day. This morning I took the dogs out on a long walk, although really this was a part of the assignment, because it is when I do all of my thinking. There is nothing quite like ambling along in the silence and clambering over fallen trees to send me flapping off on internal flights of fantasy.
I was so immersed in the story that I remember almost not a thing about the walk. Indeed, I bumped into a neighbour, of ten years standing, and it took me ages to work out who she was. Worse, I could not think of a thing to say, and very nearly started explaining that I was thinking about the battle of Culloden, because I was so distracted that I thought she might be interested.
I didn’t, fortunately, because I can’t imagine for a minute that she would have been.
When I got home I ate some bread with butter and lumps of cheese, which sounds nice in a rural peasant sort of way, but which was actually quite horrible, because the butter had finished up in the sort of lumps that just taste like grease. I washed it down with some chocolate buttons, and started on the story.
I had a dilemma, because the story that I wanted to write was far too long for the assignment that I was supposed to be doing. In fact I had intended to save it and write it for the last assignment, but it had filled my head so much that I could not have seen round it to find something else to write, and so in the end I gave up and wrote it.
This took me the entire day, but I finished it in the end and felt very pleased with myself. I had intended to spend a little bit of the day writing the assignment and the rest making fudge. Fortunately Mark is still trying to re-associate himself with the smaller trousers, and so probably did not mind all that much, I will have to do the fudge tomorrow.
I did manage to get dinner ready, which I felt to be an achievement. I did not want to go to the shop, because of the loathsome masks that our beloved leaders have once again imposed on us, so we had to have things out of the fridge. This always means eating the least exciting things, because they are what is left.
Hence we had some elderly swordfish from the bottom of the freezer. The label told me that this had been a reduced price bargain from Booths in June 2019, so I took care to put it in the bin before Mark got home. With it we had some potatoes grown up at the field with all the slug holes cut out of them, and some beetroot.
Mark, loyally, said that it was splendid, and that it was very nice to come home to a story and a lovely cooked dinner.
I am never quite sure if he means this sort of thing or not, but he would be at liberty to say so if he preferred something else.
In the event the dinner was perfectly edible, especially with plenty of mayonnaise, and we curled up in the living room to watch a film whilst we ate.
It was a brilliant film, in a terrible and depressing sort of way, and kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time. It should not have done this, because it was about the American Airlines flight where the passengers fought off the terrorists on the dreadful day when America was hijacked, all those years ago, and so I knew what happened in the end. All the same it was so good that I kept hoping that things might turn out differently, which they didn’t.
I had read that it was a very accurate film, not that anybody can really know.
They were so very brave.
Suddenly I have stopped minding that we won’t be able to fly anywhere for a while.
