Just a few words whilst Mark is not here. It has been such an utterly perfect day that it deserves to be recorded.
We are home. Well, I am at home. During our absence the builders at the back of the house dumped a huge pile of firewood in the alley for us. There was an enormous stack of it, too much to fit in the yard, at least if I want to dry any washing there for the next few days, not that that is likely, since we are back in the Lake District and it is raining.
Hence Mark loaded the dogs and the firewood into the back of his taxi and took it up to his shed at the farm, whilst I rushed round stuffing things into the washing machine and wondering what I ought to do with the dungarees that we only wore for a couple of hours, on the way across to York.
It has been a wonderful day.
This new-found joy in life has been hugely helped along by the sunshine. I have concluded that I might be Vitamin D deficient, because I have been wandering around in it for two whole days now, and am still the colour that a make-up artist might use to give a ring of authenticity to Hamlet’s father.
The sun shone this morning, and we ambled through the baking heat into York for another think about computers. We did not purchase one in the end, because of the colossal cost and also because they did not have any of the one I wanted and so we would have to come back in a fortnight. However we did purchase some pretty cotton summer dresses, because Mark said that black, which is the colour of my current summer dress, looked awful. It is not black because I am in mourning but because I have worn the same predictably comfortable style of summer dresses for the past ten years, and last time they wore out, black was the only replacement colour I could get.
These dresses are not black. They are pink and yellow and turquoise. I have hung them up on the drying rack, and very peculiar they do look against the grey of a Lake District summer.
We bought them from a smiling round Indian lady on York market, and afterwards we sat in the shade of a huge umbrella and ate some sort of spicy foreign wrap-sandwich and drank ginger green tea. This is the sort of thing that you can get in York, which is excitingly cosmopolitan by northern standards. Do not expect burritos and halloumi if you come to the Lake District. We are still at the stage where we think that curry sauce on chips is disturbingly exotic here.
We were almost back at the camper van when my flip flop broke. On inspection there were rather more tooth marks in it than one might usually expect to find in a flip-flop, so it was not surprising. However it meant I was obliged to hobble the rest of the distance in my bare feet. We had not brought the dogs with us because of the heat of the pavements, and when I tried them for myself it was very clear indeed that this had been a wise decision, because you could have cooked halloumi on them.
I was not sorry to reach the camper van and put on my yesterday’s flip-flops, although they were rather repulsively sticky and probably faintly chewed as well. This did not matter because the soles of my feet had become entirely blackened, like toast when the telephone rings at the wrong moment.
We set off for home then, except we did not go home. We remembered that we were in Yorkshire, and stopped at the butcher’s near Oliver’s old prep school and bought wonderful pork pies. We would have liked to go past his school, but it just seemed too sad, so we didn’t. Instead we went further along the road and stopped at a place where we had once, twice, actually, done a sponsored walk with that very school.
We had been dropped off there and walked back to school, we must have been much younger because it was a jolly long way. It had been to raise money for charities for the blind, because there was a blind pupil at school at the time, and so everybody had a go at being blindfolded for part of the way and being dragged along by the others, to much cursing and amusement.
It had been a splendid middle-class amble with lots of excited dogs, into which ours fitted perfectly, although when we arrived back at school we discovered there were a couple of extra dogs that didn’t belong to anybody, and who had somehow just joined in along the way. This was the headmaster’s problem, so the rest of us just laughed and got stuck into the wine whilst he made frantic phone calls and thought longingly of his day off.
We were not blindfold today. Instead we put on our swimming costumes and plunged into the river, which was deep and cool and dark and glorious.
Little fish nibbled at our toes and Rosie made muddy paw-prints all over our towels, and we wallowed in the water and swam up and down under the bridge. When we got out all the sticky grit and grime of York had been rinsed away.
It will make its way back there. The chap on the riverboat tour told us about rivers flowing into York and this was one of them.
Oliver sent us a picture when we got back to the camper van. He was also swimming, in the icy Arctic seas around Gordonstoun, because he has finished his very last exam this morning, and he was celebrating.
I have attached it below.
What a party it looks to be.
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