We are here.
It has happened, we have made it, it is lovely.
We are at the wonderful, glorious Midland at long, long last.
It feels like a lifetime since we were last here, although it isn’t, and can’t possibly be, since the doorman recognised us and the manager remembered us, so maybe we haven’t been as parsimonious and sensibly economically prudent as I would like to think.
Reckless is probably a better word.
Still it is the loveliest, happiest place, and I am perfectly contented.
It has been a long, final haul to get here, starting with a very lot of cleaning and hoovering, sensibly making sure that we would leave the house tidy and welcoming for our return. That is months and months away, practically another life, at least, not until Thursday, but still it will be lovely to have a welcome home waiting for us.
It might be quite a passionate welcome home, because we have left all of the livestock there. We decided that probably they would prefer to be lonely and abandoned than suffer the homesick trauma of being dumped in kennels, and so somebody is going to pop round and feed and let them out several times a day.
I felt very guilty when I saw their poor abandoned little faces staring longingly at us through the door, but I went anyway.
It was the dogs’ faces. The cats did not seem to give a hoot.
Things slowed down a bit towards the end of the departure process anyway when one of the neighbours called and said that she hadn’t seen the old lady from up the alley for a few weeks, and wondered if everything was all right.
When Mark and Dave went round to see, the windows were full of bluebottles.
This is generally a fairly convincing sign that things are not very all right, and indeed, when Vic climbed in through the window, the old lady had been dead for quite some time.
The police were called, in the shape of a couple of youthful officers who hadn’t been able to think of anything convincingly more urgent to do. They seemed resigned to their lot and ploughed their way through the very nasty smell so that they could nod solemnly as we all agreed that she was very definitely dead.
Poor lady. I had barely known her at all, other than as a polite nodding person in the back alley, but it was a sad moment all the same.
Vic went home to soak the smell of long-dead person away in a hot bath, and we went to Manchester, wondering what had happened and how she had died. Of course the only family detective was not there, and so we were merely guessing wildly. Probably we will never know.
I was not sorry that we had a bright few days in front of us in Manchester, instead of hanging around Windermere contemplating our own mortality. Some day probably something very similar will herald my own departure from the world, and I will also finish up being found, odiferously, by my own future Oak Street neighbours.
I hope they will say She Had A Good Innings.
It is not difficult for the afternoon to be more cheerful than the morning under those circumstances, and ours was splendid, featuring a very great deal of eating and drinking. I have got terrible indigestion now, by means of penance.
I do not really mind this, it has been an evening bursting with excesses, and I have enjoyed every moment.
Tomorrow we are going to go on the Christmas markets and perhaps have a swim. Life can hold no greater pleasures.
Even the sad events of the morning have not managed to disturb my holiday equilibrium.
I am most wonderfully contented.
