This is likely to be a very short and, I hope, often-interrupted entry.
I am in the taxi rank, and it is raining a very great deal.
Also it is double time and it is very expensive.
I am pleased about this.
I have left Lucy for the very purposes of double time. She is going to paint some more walls whilst I am gone, and I am going to go back to her house next week and fit a new electricity consumer unit. I have done this before but it is a long time ago so I had better look it all up again.
It turned out that Oliver had survived in my absence, about which I was also pleased, it would have been a terrible waste of all of those school fees if he had expired whilst I was not there to serve him pizza and give him earache about bringing his washing downstairs.
Mark has arrived on his oil rig, you will be pleased to hear, and also sounds to be perfectly fine. He says they are very keen indeed about health and safety because somebody was killed on that oil rig a few years ago, and now they are barely allowed to get out of bed until they have put their safety helmet and steel toe-capped boots on.
It is a good job they are not going to be supervising my electricity-box installation.
We discussed his taxi, which is due for an MOT in a week or two. He says it needs a new windscreen wiper motor and a new switch for the windows, so I will need to order and fit one. I am trying to sound competent about this but actually I would not be able to identify a windscreen wiper motor if the Easter Bunny left one on the end of my bed. I will have to order a new one and then hunt about under the bonnet until I find something that looks similar and see if I can swap them over.
In other news, the Lake District has become a traffic nightmare. It took me almost four hours to get back here from Lucy’s today, simply because of the huge numbers of cars heading north. Fortunately about half of them were off to Blackpool, so things improved after they had all buzzed off, but it did not improve very much and I do not think I managed to hit seventy miles an hour all of the way up here.
It appears that they have all come to Bowness. It is dark and raining, and they are all driving round and round in circles trying to find something pretty to look at. As I write there are six cars blocking the road outside the fish and chip shop, and a huge queue of doleful-looking wet people dangling out of the door.
I am very glad I live here and do not have to try and enjoy myself whilst being gloomily aware that the whole shebang is costing me five hundred pounds a night.
That is the actual cost of a night in the ever-popular Aphrodite’s. You get a hot tub in your bedroom thrown in for that, but personally I have always found that a shower suffices well enough. They do not allow children, which is probably an inducement.
It is our wedding anniversary tomorrow, talking of romantic holiday weekends. We have been married for a very long time, but we will not be going to Aphrodite’s, not even just to some of its syllables. We will be working, hundreds of miles apart. I am feeling fairly pragmatic about this, it is, after all, just a day. I have suggested that we purchase some new towels as an anniversary present, since Mark has now got some actual cash coming in and the ones I like the look of are very expensive, which you will not be surprised to hear. I think that will be a romantic celebration.
We will be able to think of one another every time we dry between our toes.
I will see you on Sunday.
