And then to the north

We are home.

Everybody else is watching a noisy and thrilling film. I am not very interested in thrilling films, and so I have abandoned them to come and write to you.

I am finding it very difficult to write, because there is a cat on my keyboard. Indeed, there seems to be a cat just about everywhere I look, not to mention a couple of dogs.

I think they might have abandonment issues.

They have been ably cared for in our absence by the lodger, who no longer lives with us but in Bowness. She is a brave soul who visited three times daily, during which time the dogs behaved like complete idiots and would not do what they were told, and the cats both, in turn, disappeared. One had to be rescued from the shed at the end of the alley, whence she had followed somebody in but neglected to follow them out again, and hence finished up imprisoned when they locked the door. Fortunately her mewing was sufficiently desperate to alert the lodger, who managed to rescue her by dragging a bit of board off the space where the window had been.

Once she had returned home her sister disappeared, not to reappear until we did. The cat’s sister, not the lodger’s, obviously.

Both of them are now sitting between me and the computer screen, patting the keyboard and purring loudly to compensate for their time of lonely abandonment.

The dogs are downstairs, begging hopefully for chocolate.

I am as pleased to be home as they are to see us all. It is lovely to have adventures, but three days is quite long enough.

We have unpacked, and even done most of the washing. I have taken our middle-class dresses to the dry cleaner and carefully wrapped our coats up on their hangers with the mothballs. Mark has cooked dinner and the house is festooned with washing, and we decided, after almost no consideration at all, not to go to work.

I am going to go to bed very soon indeed.

Leaving the glorious Midland was enlivened this morning by the fire alarm going off unexpectedly. It was immediately plain from the horror on the staff’s faces that this was no fire drill, and they dashed round putting on high-vis jackets and telling us all to get out. Oliver and Elise were still milling about upstairs and were shepherded out of the back of the hotel. We had been hanging about by the front door anyway, looking at our watches and marvelling at how long it was taking Oliver to pack his things, so we drifted out at the front, grumbling a bit and looking hopefully at the upstairs windows to see if we could spot any exciting tendrils of smoke or the beginnings of an inferno, but disappointingly there were none.

We all finished up in different places, but were fortunately reunited when they decided that the hotel was not going to burn down. Some very misfortunate individuals had been in the swimming pool, and were clad in wet swimming costumes and inadequate towels, leaving them shivering convulsively in the bracing December breeze.

There was no further need to hang about when it became clear that there were not going to be fire engines, and reluctantly, we collected out things together and loaded them into the car. The car was so full that there was barely room for us, I do not understand how luggage manages to expand like this, even on the shortest of trips.

After that we turned our faces northwards. We had to leave Lucy, who was back at work, but she is coming home tomorrow, so it does not matter.

We are back at work tomorrow as well.

I said I would tell you about the pantomime.

It was splendid.

That says it all.