I don’t have any exciting toe-related news today but could not resist the title. My toe is still there, sitting pinky on the end of my foot and making me walk the way one might if the Mafia had shoved one foot into a bucket of cement, but then couldn’t afford the bus fare to the canal.
Other than that I am managing perfectly well. I have taken the last antibiotic and am guiltily aware that I have become dull on the toepic. Toedious, in fact.
Sorry.
I am sitting on the taxi rank in the rain, wishing that the climate crisis would hurry up and reach the Lake District, because it has been Clean Sheets Day, and the house is draped with steaming laundry. We have lit the fire but it is not helping, and even with all of the windows and doors open, the modern gadget in the climate-obsessed clock told us that the air contained eighty one percent humidity, we are going to need gills at this rate.
I would happily send our current climate to Greece for a week or two, it sounds as though they might appreciate it more than me.
It was a Day Off. Not a truly exciting Day Off, because as you will have observed, I am actually at work as I write, although frankly I might as well not be because I have been sitting here for ages and have not yet made enough money to pay for the fuel to take me back home. Still, it is peaceful here, I am enjoying writing to you, and have got a good book about axe murderers to read when I have finished, what a lovely evening it will be. I do wish I had a more middle-class taste in books, between the axe-murderers and Jilly Cooper I am always embarrassed when they ask us at university to discuss what we are actually reading. The last time they asked I was reading Piers Morgan’s Diaries, which was an utterly enthralling read, but the only book that anybody mentioned the lecturer had not also read. I told him he was missing out, but he did not seem to mind very much.
We are going to go out later, imagine that. I am going to work until Oliver finishes at about quarter past ten, and then we are all going to go and have an Indian dinner, to say farewell to Lucy and to congratulate Oliver on passing his driving theory test, which he did this afternoon.
We can book him a driving test now. The next slot for one in Kendal was not until January, and he will have gone back to school by then. Barrow has one in October, during half term, but only one, and it is so early it is practically in the middle of the night.
We will discuss it over our midnight dinner.
In fact it has been a day of complete shirking. I leaped out of bed this morning, in a groaning, creaky sort of way, resolved to scrub the house from attic to cellar and make our lives fresh and revitalised, except half an hour later my friend Kate rang, suggesting that they come and visit for the afternoon.
Obviously I could not agree quickly enough, we have not seen them for ages, and spending an afternoon in the conservatory drinking tea and idly speculating about the shocking state of the world was a massive improvement on the previous housework intention. By great good fortune neither of us was at work, because Mark had decided to occupy the day sawing up and stacking the huge mound of firewood which was teetering precariously in the yard, before any more of it collapsed on my inadequately booted feet.
He did not much want to do that either.
Hence we loafed, happily, in the conservatory, listening to the rain beating down overhead and feeling that if only we were in charge of the Government, how much better everything would be.
Well, I felt like that, I don’t know how they were feeling, obviously.
They have just been on holiday on a canal barge. It sounds like ace fun, although possibly less exciting than Blackpool.
I am sorry that our holidays are over. We will have another one as soon as we have saved up a bit.
I suppose it will be Christmas quite soon.
