Brief entry because I am trying to think about my assignment.
I am getting along with this in between times. So far I have written almost a hundred words, only another nine thousand nine hundred to go. I can do them after dinner on Christmas Day maybe.
In fact it has been a day of remarkably little achievement. I pegged the washing out on the line this morning, and not for the first time this week, it was frozen into fascinatingly rigid sheets when I brought it in. I laid our clothes on the table to thaw, where they lay stiffly like the paper clothes I remember from childhood comics. These came with little white tabs, and you cut them off the back page and folded the tabs over the shoulders of the cut-out Bunty. I was always regrettably clumsy for this exercise and frequently had to remedy my deficiencies with Sellotape.
Our clothes did not have Sellotape, or cut out white tabs, just a white sparkly sheen, like the fairy in the pantomime.
They were quite a bit drier, though, which was handy. I bashed them about until I could get coathangers inside them, and hung them up, optimistically, to steam.
Mark took the dogs off to the farm. I was not sorry to get the dogs out from under my feet. They have been competing hard for fallen Christmas tree chocolates, and relations between them have soured a little.
Actually they have not really been waiting for the chocolates to fall. It is almost impossible to walk past the Christmas tree without spotting a dog sticking out of it somewhere, hopefully leaning in hard to try and reach the chocolates dangling from the less-accessible branches. They know they are not allowed to do this, and are terribly guilty when spotted, but their longing is too great to be resisted, like a three year old and an unsupervised table of marshmallows.
I tidied up and swept in their absence.
When they came back we dressed in our warmest jackets and trotted off into Windermere, because it was the day of the Christmas Market. We had been reminded of this even in our dreams, because it had featured the lively performance of Windermere Thunder Drummers at some time before we had planned to get out of bed.
Windermere Christmas Market is absolutely rubbish by the standards of Christmas markets. I have perused my way around all sorts of vast and sophisticated Christmas markets, including one in Prague, where a whole pig was spitting and smoking as it was slowly turned on a spit over an open fire.
Obviously those are cooking terms. The pig itself was dead, and was not spitting and smoking in the way of the less desirable taxi customers, please use your common sense.
Anyway, I have sampled mulled wine in many winter cities, and I think I can say that in a Christmas Market competition, Windermere would come nowhere at all, unless you could count Last.
Nevertheless for such a little place, really it was jolly good.
Practically everything on sale had been made and created by people in the village. There were doorstops made out of triangles of logs and painted to look like slices of melon. There were home-made candles, and necklaces made out of bits of pottery. There were hand-painted decorations, and pictures of the lake, and all sorts of other interesting treasures too numerous to mention. Some of the local hotels had taken stalls, and were busily handing out glasses of cheap plonk in the hope of attracting visitors for next season. The local travelling fair had an inflatable gingerbread cottage, the local councillor had painted himself green, and there were some marvellous stilt walkers.
I always like those. If it were not for the inconvenience of broken hips I would be very tempted to get hold of a pair and have a go.
We did not purchase anything, apart from some dog flea tablets from the pet shop on our way home, they are going to kennels in a week or so and you can’t be too careful. All the same, it was a happy little place to spend an afternoon, and I came home filled with fresh inspiration for ways in which Mark could build us a home smoker.
I will keep you posted about that one.
And now, back to my assignment.
