I am feeling so unspeakably idle I can hardly find the words to tell you about it.
This is the third night we have collapsed in front of the big screen in the living room and done absolutely nothing except gawp mindlessly at it.
This is because there is still not much point in being at work, and also because my college course has told me that there are some things I need to watch in order to learn about scriptwriting.
We have watched some very tedious drivel which I can only imagine has been included to show us how not to write a script. I like adventures in my evening viewing with my glass of wine. I do not wish to be a spectator to the sort of tiresome story about underprivileged foreigners that has been written by some virtuous leftie in order to make white middle class people feel guilty. I know we have not quite made it to the middle classes yet, but I can share in their guilt if I like, and since I don’t like, we switched it off.
Anyway, as luck would have it, somebody sensible has contributed to the MustWatch list, and we have just sat through a couple of entirely entertaining episodes of a television series called the Good Karma Hospital. We did not in the least expect to enjoy this, but it is splendid. It is filled with entirely unlikely stories and has been written by somebody with almost no idea whatsoever about medicine or anything else useful, even their details about fixing generators were wildly off the mark. Nevertheless it is lightweight, sunny and completely cheering, with a love interest and some old people stories and a tiny sprinkling of tragedy and we liked it very much. I do not know what I have learned from it, except possibly that a lack of research will lead to your script being jeered at by better-informed taxi drivers, but it has been a very entertaining way of passing an evening.
I am glad we have enjoyed one thing, because we will probably be starting back at work next week. The post-Christmas malaise will not yet have passed, because the caravan sites are still closed, along with lots of guest houses and even the restaurants, but there will be a few people around, and we always need the cash.
I am pleased to tell you that Mark has been over to Darlington this morning and returned with a very great deal of rusty stuff in the back of my taxi. It has taken him all day, because his gypsy friend had not yet sawed the truck off the top of the bits that he needed, so they did it together in a spirit of oily brotherhood. He is going to start working on the camper van tomorrow, after he has cleaned my taxi. There was a happy moment because he had to take the back seats out in order to fit it all in, and discovered £5.63 jammed inaccessibly underneath them, We were very pleased with this development, another brightly-lined cloud.
I stayed at home and did useful things, one of which was to manufacture a stuffed sausage to put at the back of the camper van door to stop the draught. This is a noticeable draught, through which you can see quite a bit of daylight, and since it has not yet breathed its last after all, was well worth repairing. I am pleased and excited to think that we will still have a camper van. Cambridge would have been a sad adventure without it.
I took the dogs for their hike over the fells. Rosie was most surprised to discover that when she took her accustomed plunge into the tarn, she landed with an unexpected thunk instead of the colossal splash that usually makes everybody else step back in a hurry. She stood and stared for a minute, picking up her paws one by one to see if there was something the matter with them, and then set off across the ice at high speed, sliding and rolling and barking with the greatest excitement.
Roger Poopy has become very sensible in his old age. He stood beside me on the bank shaking his head wisely and sighing a little until she came back.
She did come back, of course, although the world is beginning to get a little warmer and probably it is a good job she will be spending tomorrow at the farm with Mark, because a thaw could have exciting consequences for an ice-skating adventure.
They will all be off with the camper van tomorrow.
I will have the whole day to myself.
Until work, that is.
