Poor Liz Truss, she does seem to have attracted the attention of the Gods somehow.
She has been Prime Minister for a week and whilst she has been busy trying to implement a programme of earth-shakingly radical fiscal reforms, the Gods keep dropping other things on her head. I imagine they just like to watch her flapping so that they can laugh, like the Weather Gods do with me and the washing.
So far, a week into the job, she has had a dead Queen and new King, and now today the prospect of imminent nuclear war. It seems as though Putin is threatening to annihilate us. I am mildly concerned about this. Nuclear devastation would be a nuisance but would at least mean we no longer had to worry about the mortgage.
The talk in the august Daily Telegraph was about a bomb being dropped on Birmingham. I do not know why Birmingham, unless perhaps President Putin has been there. We are being told that the world’s leaders, none of whom seem to live in Birmingham, are calling his bluff, but I am not quite sure that they are. Here in Windermere the skies have been filled with the deafening thunder of Tornadoes and Hurricanes and other weather-related aeroplanes all day.
The Air Force practises here. Usually they just zoom up the lake, playing joyous boy-in-a-fast-aeroplane games of rolling and diving, but they are not doing that any more. They are hurtling over the town. Mark thinks they are going about a hundred miles an hour faster than usual, and they are tipping and angling and flying very low indeed, presumably practising what they would do if they were flying above The Enemy instead of just over Church Street Windermere.
I am jolly glad I am not The Enemy. They are on our side and I can tell you they are still very scary indeed. Especially they are scary because if they are not jolly careful they are going to take somebody’s chimney pot off, and there will be an awful fuss if they do that, I can tell you. That would upset the council even more than dog poo in the park.
If I were Liz Truss I would be sending some of the more junior members of the Cabinet off to do a God Distraction Ceremony somewhere else, preferably the sort without any clothes on and some wild dancing and hopping about in the firelight. Outdoors would be best although chilly at this time of year, but at least it might divert some divine attention and they might start thinking about stinging nettles and thistles instead of nuclear apocalypse.
In other news, we have been busily reorganising our lives before Mark goes back to work tomorrow. I have been tidying up our drawers and throwing away all clothes with too many holes in to keep out the winter chill. I am aware that in our new age of austerity I should be mending them, but I am just thriftless and anyway I am trying to write a poem. In any case holes caused by battery acid or welding burns do not look very nice even if they have been neatly darned.
Mark has been faffing about in the yard, welding up the holes in the boiler. There are a lot of them. It has become very rusty, and he has made a very great deal of mess. There are rusty footprints absolutely everywhere.
I took the dogs out over the fell this morning, to stop them fighting over the ball. They took it to bed with them last night, and we all went to sleep to a faint green glow illuminating us all from the bedroom floor. It is making them very happy.
We bought some new handkerchiefs whilst we were out. That made us very happy as well, although we are not fighting over them. Nobody seems to sell handkerchiefs any more, and we had to look for them for quite some time. Marks & Spencer sells men’s handkerchiefs but not ladies’, and I had a brief rant about this inequality at the checkout, which they ignored. I bought mine somewhere else in the end, and was glad I did, because they are pretty and delicate and too nice to waste on mopping up spilled tea and wiping sticky fingers, which all too often are the uses for which mine are employed.
I will have to become more careful in my dining habits.
