According to the august Daily Telegraph, last night recorded a temperature of nine and a half degrees below zero in Cumbria.
I am not surprised by this, because it was jolly cold, and it has led to a terrible disaster which was all of our own making, but a disaster all the same.
We forgot to go and drain the water in the camper van and it has burst all of the taps. We know it has burst the taps, because they had icicles squirting out of them. It might well have burst the tanks as well, we do not know yet. We can’t find out because it is still too cold.
This is a tragedy. Actually it is going to be very expensive, as tragedies usually are. Indeed, at the moment I am inclined to the opinion that a free tragedy would not really be a tragedy at all. I would not mind being sad if only I could afford it.
It is going to cost us about two hundred quid. I think we really will have to sell the dogs this time.
It means that all the cash Mark has earned getting up early this week will not go into our overdraft after all. We have blown it, or perhaps burst it would be a better turn of phrase, on new taps.
We have not blown it yet. They are still sitting in the camper van in solid frozen lumps. Mark wondered optimistically if he might be able to mend them, but we both know he won’t really.
I am disconsolate.
It is terribly cold. You have probably spotted this. The washing had frozen into hard sheets on the line when I brought it in this afternoon. I was a little bit impressed by this, the most savage weather always seems to strike an unexpectedly satisfactory chord somehow. It is easy to feel a bit pleased because our house is wonderfully warm. There are no chilling draughts anywhere any more.
Lucy is cold all the time. She has come from the south and all of her clothes seem to be made of tissue paper. She does not have a single garment which is thoroughly lined with brown paper and goose grease, the way properly northern clothes are supposed to be. The newspaper said that the chap in charge of running London into the ground had declared a weather emergency and told Londoners not to go out, presumably in case their toes got cold in their vegan goat-hair knitted sandals.
I have got good warm boots and there is no weather emergency here, it is just cold, so I am all right. My boots have got sheepskin liners in them. I have been wearing them this week for the first time this winter. Mark went off to work again this morning, and so I took the dogs out around the park. They like the frost because all the dog-wee smells stay around, and they can dash from one to another, finding out who went out for early dog-emptying.
Mark sawed more wood up last night so I did not need to do any this morning. He has been splitting wood at the farm, of course it splits much more easily when it is frozen than it does when it is sodden. Today he was off car-fixing again, so I did cooking, it was of course Pie Day.
I did not only make pies. I cooked curried chicken for picnics, and sausages, and made vanilla ice cream. I like the blackcurrant sort best but the tiresome children will not eat it so it has to be vanilla. I made the ice cream so we could have ice cream with apple pies, except I did not make any of those. I made cheese and onion pies, and then ran out of day. It seemed to vanish very quickly, even though it had started in the middle of the night. The alarm went off before the daylight had appeared, and we had to have coffee by candle-light.
Apple pies will have to come tomorrow. The cheese and onion pies have turned out splendidly well.
They might not be very good with vanilla ice cream.
