So far the storm is raging disappointingly un-ragily.
I know that one is not supposed to be pleased about calamities, but it is always thrilling when the weather threatens to turn our ordered little world into a catastrophe, and so I was slightly sorry to discover, on returning home, that apart from fairly normally rubbish weather, Cumbria is still here pretty much in its entirety.
It is not that there was any of it that I exactly wanted to be rid of, apart from the irritating roadworks at the bottom of the hill at Bowness roundabout, but it would have been quite exciting to have had an adventure worth getting worried about. It is disappointing to find out that here at least, it is just the normal sort of weather, about which the newspapers and the television have made a colossal fuss, much the same as usual.
We left Manchester this morning after a delightfully huge breakfast of salmon and cheese and pain au chocolat, followed by egg and bacon and hash browns, with a huge quantity of coffee and orange juice, and this time I really am not going to need to eat anything again for ages, apart from dinner this evening, obviously.
It is very lovely to wake up in the Midland. I could have a shower and not bother about wiping the mirrors or the bath, and I left my empty coffee cup on the chest of drawers without a care in the world. When I win the lottery I will never wipe a mirror or wash a coffee cup again, and I will eat roast salmon every single day.
We trucked rather slowly back up the motorway, because of the rubbish weather. This was heavy rain, rather than gigantic hailstones or hurricanes or blizzards. There were not even any floods.
There seemed to be an awful lot of people leaving the Lake District, however, we are not expecting to have a very lucrative night at work.
We did not go straight home, but diverted via Elspeth’s house to drink tea and collect the dogs. This was splendid, it is important to have somebody to tell your adventures to. Adventures are somehow incomplete until you have described them to somebody.
Obviously I can describe them on here, but it is quite good to do the speaking-and-cups-of-tea sort of reminiscence as well.
The dogs were pleased to see us, which was just as well, and have been wonderfully well-behaved ever since, presumably in case we get fed up of them again and abandon them somewhere else.
I was relieved, although mildly disappointed, to arrive home and discover no storm damage whatsoever, and all of the electricity functioning perfectly normally. This meant that instead of doing exciting things like hunting out candles and kick-starting generators, we just had to get on with all of the usual things like getting washing done and dinner ready for work.
I did these things. Mark went bravely out into the not-hurricane-but-still-rubbish weather, to put the new bit on the camper van brakes. You might remember that we had a small but nevertheless quite terrifying adventure on our way home when the brakes ceased to function, and Mark was obliged to do some repairs yet again.
He has not quite finished yet. He has got the old bit off and the new bit assembled ready to go on, and he says he will complete it tomorrow.
Oliver dashed off to work, because he is washing pots this evening, and I hung up washing and filled boxes with salads. I like salad, we are not eating it because of feeling guilty about our eating habits, although perhaps we ought to be, certainly after the last couple of days. In any case, as salads go, it is pretty good. There is nothing awful in it like cucumber, and plenty of interesting stuff like Scotch eggs.
I think we have now tidied up. Everything is put away, and all that remains of our trip is the pile of ironing for next week.
It is going to be a very busy weekend. Tomorrow we are all working, but on Sunday Lucy has got to go home and we have got to take Oliver back to school. Lucy is taking Ritalin Boy with her, who is visiting his Other Grandma, and I have got my all-day University class on Sunday.
It is all going to be a bit busy.
The weather might be more exciting in Scotland.
You never know.
