It is raining. It is raining very hard indeed, so that despite being the only taxi on the taxi rank, nobody is coming across to get in. They are staying where they are and having another drink in the hope that it will clear up.
Mark is still plumbing. He is hoping to get it finished tonight. I jolly well hope that he does, because he is going back to work tomorrow, and we have got to set off on Tuesday night.
He has been plumbing for the whole day, apart from once when he appeared briefly downstairs to eat cheese on toast and to unscrew a pump. I do not know what the pump is for. There are lots of pumps in the new plumbing system.
It occupies all of the cupboard in Lucy’s bedroom, and looks like the sort of thing that you see illustrated in books about Steampunkers. It is short only of a chap in a monocle and top hat riding a bicycle.
I have not been plumbing. I took the dogs out for a long amble across the fell, and then came back and cleaned the dresser.
This is a huge job, not as huge as plumbing, obviously, but quite sufficiently huge to take up all of the afternoon and involve lots and lots of washing up and wiping things. The dresser is weighted down with all of my favourite, prettiest china, artistically arranged to be shown off to its best advantage and to make me look as middle-class as possible, and to collect the maximum possible amount of dust.
There was a lot of dust and I have washed it all off. It was gritty, and a bit greasy, and entirely horrible. Worse, some of it was encrusted with salt, which has been the product of a beautiful lamp made out of a lump of Himalayan salt, for which our Lake District summer has just proved too much, and every now and again bits of it have dissolved, not in splashes but in the actual air.
All you southerners grumbling about your drought take note. I bet none of you have spent your summer struggling with dissolving furniture.
I thought whilst I was doing it that it was a jolly good thing to do because it would be all fresh and clean ready for Christmas, and then remembered gloomily that Christmas is still months away, and it will very likely need to be cleaned again before then.
The dogs rolled about being a nuisance under my feet whilst I did it, and Rosie ate a stick that had once been used to stir paint. When I looked down there were a thousand fragments of painty-stick splinters all over the entire floor. I was not pleased, and would have confiscated the stick by means of illustrating my feelings, but either she has eaten all of it or she has hidden it.
This might make for some very uncomfortable emptying-adventures tomorrow.
I am also mildly concerned to report that the spider which has been lurking on the outside of our bedroom window has disappeared, completely and absolutely.
I do not know where it has gone.
If it has foreseen the approaching winter and decided to decamp through the open window into the bedroom I can absolutely promise that it will jolly well regret it, although probably not for very long. I do not at all wish to encounter it trying my shoes on or looking at its reflection in the mirror, and it might well find that its lack of welcome turns out to be terminal.
It was very large, and it took me absolutely ages to scrub all of its vile spidery poo off the glass. Spiders poo a lot more than you expect, although I am prepared to concede that some of it might have been done by her briefly visiting boyfriend, possibly at the moment when he realised that their relationship was going to end rather more abruptly than he had anticipated.
I looked all around the sill and the ledge underneath, but there was no sign at all, not even a large, curly-legged corpse.
I hope it has just moved house.
It would be much happier next door.
