I am having a very jolly afternoon.
I am sitting on the taxi rank.
I did not expect to be very busy, and I have not been, but I have caught up on lots of gossip, and looked happily at the lake. I have drunk half a flask of tea and eaten some home-made fudge and a slab of brandy fruit cake. I have tootled around the village a few times, and now I am leaning back in my chair to write to you.
The council have still not finished their roadworks at the taxi rank. can’t remember if I told you, but they have had a frantic few weeks of hasty construction, installing huge bollards and massive lumps of stone all along the edge of the lake.
The purpose of this was because the police rang them up and told them that somebody was planning a terrorist attack, and that it would be a good idea to have an impregnable barrier between the hundreds of contented tourists, ambling along the side of the lake eating ice creams and fighting off the ducks, and the jihadist nutters in the truck loaded with explosives.
The council obliged, with more speed than they have ever done anything ever, and although they still have not finished, I would defy any jihadist to get anywhere within massacring distance of even a swan, unless it had become distracted by its wrathful pursuit of a Japanese tourist and wandered into the road.
Spring has most certainly sprung now. The steamers are running at full pelt up and down the lake, and this afternoon I discovered two ladybirds in the garden. They were doing the thing that ladybirds do in order to manufacture more ladybirds. Most of my knowledge of ladybirds comes from a vague recollection of Enid Blyton stories in my youth, and it had never occurred to me that they would do such a thing, although I don’t quite know what I had imagined they might do instead. I suppose you never know with beetles.
We have a plague of aphids in the conservatory at the moment, and so I captured them and dumped them in the foxgloves, they can hunt a few down and feed them to their babies. I hope they have hundreds of babies, we have just been obliged to fork out six quid for some ladybird larvae in the vague hope that they would devour them for us, but so far they don’t seem to have made any difference at all.
The sun beamed down on our walk this morning, which was absolutely glorious. The hawthorn is in full bridal blossom now, and there are toad-tadpoles in the pond at the bottom of the fell. They all burrowed frantically into the mud when Rosie fell in, which she did, having disastrously unbalanced whilst trying to get a drink.
I called in at the butcher’s for more sausages when we got back, and he gave me a pile of bones for them all. These were received with argumentative rapture, they all wanted one another’s bones, and then wanted their own back once an exchange had been completed. All the same, it made for a wonderfully tranquil afternoon, although a very smelly carpet. This does not matter, because it is only the old one in the conservatory. Mark got it out of the skip at the Marina Village, and we are going to throw it away and lay some tiles this summer.
The butcher told me that prices have gone up something terrible, He is being obliged to pay two hundred pounds for a sheep now, and he would very much like to know how the Government thought he was going to make any money on that, whilst they were busy shipping them all off to France tag-lag, the rotters.
I agreed that good lamb is wasted on the French, who still eat pigs’ trotters, after all, and we thought that perhaps we should just keep the sheep, the way the French do with the decent wine.
I did not know that lamb had become so expensive. I will talk to Mark, who has been going on about getting some sheep for a while now.
He is going over to his garden when he has finished work, because he wants to plant some more onions and they had not arrived yesterday. We are going to meet up for a late dinner this evening.
He is getting very self-sufficient.
I would be very surprised if he has not been planning his sheep already.
