It is raining, and I am sitting in my taxi feeling desperately sympathetic towards all the poor wet people who had hoped for a sunny holiday. Instead, they are splashing miserably along the pavements, looking in the windows of closed shops, and wondering if they could perhaps occupy the end of the afternoon by having lunch again, or perhaps dinner early.
I am also having a quiet worry about Lucy, who has gone off to Devon on a camping expedition. She has gone to a live role playing festival, where I understand she will be assisting with the security arrangements. Presumably this is as well as pretending to be a magical elf, or goblin, or whatever sort of mythical creature is responsible for the maintenance of law and order in the ancient and mystical land of Dumnoni.
It sounds absolutely splendid, and I hope very much that it does not rain there.
It might not. Devon is a long way away from the Lake District, as presumably is Dumnoni.
It is very wet here.
It has been wet all day, or at any rate for the part of it which we have seen, because obviously we missed the morning.
We did not miss all of the morning. Rosie needed a wee at nine o’ clock, and came to wag about next to our bed, fidgeting and woofing anxiously.
Mark leaped out of bed and took her, but was not sufficiently awake to consider that he ought to remember his dressing gown, and had to rush through the conservatory and chuck her hastily into the yard before rushing back upstairs to put it on before he went back to let her in.
I don’t suppose any of the neighbours were out of bed.
When we did eventually emerge it was not morning any longer, and Mark loaded all of the dogs into the back of his taxi to go to the farm, so that I could get in with my college assignments in peace.
He went off to turn some of his garden over before planting, which we ought to do in the next week or so. We still plant the way the French farmers do, around the first full moon in May. I do not know why this is supposed to help but we do it anyway. The French are quite good at knowing things, even though they did elect Macron. They had a magical stream on the hillside that you were supposed to dip your children in as well, which I imagine runs along much the same principles.
Mark tootled about in his garden, and Roger Poopy unbent sufficiently from his Grumpy Old Dog pose to forget that he had become middle aged. He charged joyfully around the field with Rosie, rolling in the grass and barking until they were both worn out. We were glad about this afterwards, because they collapsed on their cushions when they got home, and slept for the rest of the day.
I wrote my assignment, which was the beginning of a dramatic play about a murdered nun, and wondered if I could also manage to read Caucasian Chalk Circle and An Enemy of the People before I went to work.
I have read them both before, obviously, but they have faded into the obscurity that shrouds long-distant theatrical classics. We have got to talk about them on Monday, maybe I could get away with saying that they are about provincials who wish they were in Moscow. This seems to work very well for pretty much all of Chekhov, perhaps I could give it a go for these.
Brecht is German, not Russian, but I don’t suppose it will matter.
In the end obviously I couldn’t, and instead occupied the rest of the afternoon making made prawn toast and salad for tonight’s in-between-customers picnic.
I thought I might read them whilst I was here, but of course it is another bank holiday weekend, and we are busy. It has taken me ages even to write this much. I started in the middle of the afternoon, and it is almost midnight now.
It is now nearly two o’ clock, and it has gone quiet for the first time since we came out.
It would be a perfect time for reading Ibsen and Brecht, if only I wasn’t starting to feel sleepy.
My next class is on Monday.
Maybe I had better get on with it.
LATER NOTE: It is now five o’ clock and I am just going to bed. I put the murdered nun play on the course website and somebody has just written underneath how funny they think it is.
I might not be cut out for writing scenes of dramatic passion.
Right. I am going to start on the Ibsen whilst Mark is in the shower.
