I am very accomplished.
That is to say, I have accomplished all sorts of things today, and I am feeling jolly pleased with myself. I have made biscuits and fudge, pistachio-and-mint chocolate, cooked a stack of sausages and roasted some ham for Mark’s dinners.
In between all of that I rushed off into Kendal to get my hair cut.
I am shorn.
It is wonderful.
My hair is about two centimetres long all over, and I am becoming reacquainted with my ears. Of course I know that long hair is more beautiful and dignified and that you can’t be a princess without tresses that fall at least to your shoulders, but I don’t care in the least. I would be most unlikely to be mistaken for a princess even if my hair came down to my knees and had gold threads and coronets woven into it. In any case it is grey anyway, and so I have got nothing to lose.
Mark does not care what my hair looks like, and indeed neither does anybody else. Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone, as has been pointed out by greater minds than mine, and I am entirely satisfied with it.
It is going to save ages of faffing about with the hairdryer, and so I can consider that I have done the environment a favour as well, what a splendid outcome.
Apart from that, I took the dogs on a long walk over the fells.
Roger Poopy has been being a rascal. We have given all three dogs a lump of dead cow bone each, which they have been fitfully gnawing and leaving in inconvenient places for the last few days. Last night all three bones had been abandoned on the stairs, and Roger Poopy noticed his as he passed, and took it up to bed with him.
Of course, as I rather think he was expecting, when Rosie saw that he had his bone, she wanted it. She was just not big enough to haul her own up the stairs, but once she laid eyes on Roger’s, she wanted to share it.
Roger Poopy did not actually want his bone at all. He was not in the least interested in chewing it. He put it between his front paws and smirked. Then he growled whenever she ventured anywhere near him.
His father sighed, and curled up out of the way in the corner. Rosie whimpered and made occasional hopeful forays, and Roger Poopy, sole possessor of a bone in his bed, sat beside it smugly and showed off his cleverness and importance.
He was most put out when I decided that I did not wish this performance to continue for the entire night, and went downstairs to collect everybody else’s bones as well. Rosie leaped on hers with grateful joy, and even his father thought he might suck on his for a while. Poor Roger Poopy put his head down and sulked.
He came round after a few minutes, and I dozed off to the sound of scraping teeth and bones thumping on the floor.
Dogs can be such rotters.
They had a splendid time on our walk. Despite being a villain, Roger Poopy has become very attached to Rosie, and they bounced around and played all the way over the fells. I do not know where they found the energy. I walked for three or four miles, but they must have run for about six, tearing excitedly up and down the slopes and charging into one another until they rolled back down again. Rosie managed to avoid the streams, but fell in the tadpole pond and the tarn again, and had to stagger out, muddily, to shake her fur dry on the banks.
Still no swifts, although I heard the first cuckoo this morning. That was a joyous moment, and I stood still and listened for a little while, and thought what a splendid place the world is.
I do not know why the sound of the cuckoo always makes me feel so pleased with life. They are such first class rotters, they are worse than Roger Poopy, but I am always pleased to hear them calling.
I thought the dogs would be exhausted when we got back, it is a long walk for such a tiny creature, but far from it, they were still rolling around and barking at one another even when I was rushing off to the hairdresser. I think they must have slept for the afternoon, because when I came back we went off to vote, and they belted all around the Library Gardens as if they had just been released from a week in solitary confinement.
Rosie ate a voting pencil that somebody had dropped on the floor. I gave the remains of it back to the chap at the desk and apologised, but he said he would just put it back in the booth anyway.
If you have voted in Windermere today and were given a splintery pencil, you now know why.
