This might be a very short post this evening.
I am in the camper van on the long trail south. I have got until we stop to finish writing tonight’s entry, and then we are going to give up and go to bed.
We have not yet decided where we are going to stop. It will be wherever we are when we get tired.
I am tired already. It seems to have been a very busy day.
Mark is tired as well, but he is driving so he will be the one to make the stopping decision. It might even come as something of a surprise, so if this suddenly cuts off halfway through a sentence you will know why.
Anyway, whilst I have got some time I can tell your all about my day. If I am honest I am not quite sure where it has gone, it seems just to have flown away whilst I was not looking. I know I have been entirely and thoroughly occupied for all of it, except for a brief shirk somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, where I sank down on the sofa and took my weight off my feet with a cup of tea. I got up again almost immediately because the sofa cover smelled revoltingly of dog, and had to be peeled off and stuffed into the washing machine.
The dogs were obliged to go and lie on their cushion, which they did, with sulky reluctance.
It is a perfectly comfortable cushion. I contemplated sleeping on it myself once, years ago, when I was having an argument with Mark. I didn’t in the end, because it smells of dog and I decided I wasn’t that cross with Mark after all.
Anyway, in between shirks and grumbling at the dogs I have packed our things for our brief sojourn in the south. I have even packed our shorts, in case the south is having a heatwave, which the Lake District most certainly is not. Oliver is going to be jolly chilly when he gets home. It has been thirty degrees in Korea. It isn’t even as if he has an insulating layer of fat.
I am trying to write this as I travel. The camper van is not the smoothest of conveyances, and auto correct keeps interfering. If I had not been carefully observant the last paragraph would have concluded by telling you that Oliver did not have an insulting lawyer so far.
As well as packing I have been doing useful cooking, you might remember this theme from the last few days. I have been fortifying our defences for our pilgrimage and also for the bank holiday weekend to follow. I can tell you now that the fridge here in the camper van is stuffed to bursting, as is the freezer in our kitchen at home. Today I have cooked prawn toast and curried chicken. We will be eating nearly as well as all of the taxi drivers who queue up in Tesco for the late night bargains just before they close and who survive on a diet of not-quite-out-of-date pies and crisps.
Finally I took the dogs for a walk up on the fell. This was not my usual morning outing because I was so busy that it was almost six o’clock when we set off, and Mark had got home before I did.
It was raining, which did not matter because it does that in the Lake District, and everything felt damp, and heavy and smelled wonderful. I have not been walking very much lately and it was splendid. The blackberries are just beginning to swell, and the air was thick with the smells of grass, and harebells, and cows, and the end of the summer.
I have missed so much of the summer whilst I have been self-pityingly limping about instead of being determined and getting proper exercise. I will have to be braver about walking. I am still not very good at it. Going uphill is fine, but going downhill is an anxious, unsteady affair, like the last person to stagger out of the nightclub after all the taxis have buzzed off.
I took my flip-flops off because having an extra foot-thing to manage was just too difficult, and that helped a bit, apart from in the places where the cows clearly like to hang about a lot. Those places were disconcertingly squishy between the toes. It is all a bit difficult, and I am going to have to get more practice.
We are somewhere just south of Liverpool, and in fact I seem to have written a lot without even noticing, so I am going to stop, now that I have given you all of my most exciting news.
Until the next thrilling instalment.
