Sea dogs

Our house always smells very lovely when we come home.

I have no idea how it manages to do this, it would be far more reasonable to expect it to pong slightly of incontinent dogs and long-ago fried prawns, but it doesn’t. It is always lovely to come home because somehow the house has a lovely clean, floral sort of smell to welcome us in. It is neither clean nor full of flowers, so it must just be the house’s own personal private way of welcoming us back. I do not know what the smell is. It wears off after about ten minutes and I don’t notice it any more. This is probably because the dogs have shaken all the mud and seawater off themselves and the fire has started to smoke and we have dumped loads of dirty washing all over the floor.

We have had a very lovely day.

After sleeping for most of yesterday we were astonished to discover, when we woke up this morning, that we had slept for a further ten hours last night.

I have attached a picture taken out of the window. I was sitting in bed when I took it. It was a very splendid awakening.

We felt brilliant. We did not exactly leap out of bed, actually we sat there for ages drinking coffee and marvelling contentedly at our own idleness, but when we did get up the sun was shining and we went for a long walk along the beach.

This was also splendid. Unlike just about everywhere else in the UK, it was not raining, not in the least, and we strolled peacefully along the frosty shore for miles and miles. The dogs plunged in and out of the icy waves, and rolled around in the sand, and seagulls called over our heads, and we saw a couple of seals. Rosie found a dead seagull and wanted to bring it home with her. She was most disappointed when she was obliged to desist from dragging it along the beach, it was almost as big as she was.

This occupied the entire morning. There is no pleasure in the world like a Scottish coast in January, it is as fresh and bitter and clean as anything in the world. We breathed in sea-spray until our lips were crusted with salt, and the wind tugged my hair until it stood upright all by itself and I looked like an elderly Aberdeen Angus that might have been startled by a collision with two thousand volts.

It was rather nice to get back to the unexpected quiet of the camper van, where we had sausages and toast for an extremely late breakfast. After some thoughtful cups of tea, we reluctantly supposed that we ought to head homewards, because it was almost three in the afternoon, and so we went.

The dogs were so exhausted after their morning’s charging about and barking that they both collapsed into the front of the cab and snored heavily until long past Glasgow, which is always a good thing with travelling dogs, they are such a nuisance when they are trying to share your chocolate buttons and sit on your knee and stick their heads out of the windows. We listened to the story and contemplated our immediate futures.

We have got several things to achieve in the next few weeks, not least that the camper van has developed a leak which must be staunched with some urgency, because it is causing a mouldery horror in one corner. I am not as terrified by such disasters as I once was, but it is still a nuisance, and is going to involve some considerable difficulty, not least because we are going to have to peel a part of the side of the van back again, and the traffic wardens in Windermere get really cross if you start doing this at the side of the road.

It is raining very hard now that we are back in Windermere. There are floods everywhere, and so we will not be fixing it tonight. We have decided to think of a solution tomorrow.

We unpacked and made sure that nothing was touching the leaky bit, and came in to our beautiful smelling house for a cup of tea and to marvel at the great good fortune of having had such a lovely day of fresh air and sunshine.

Have a picture of this morning’s view.