I was pleased to discover when I woke up this morning that I had a migraine.
This is not, of course, a delightful discovery in itself, but it most certainly felt like one this morning. It provided a perfectly acceptable explanation for my weary discomforts of yesterday. The world is not a horrid place after all, merely one with a headache in it.
I took all the drugs I thought I could sensibly consume without any potential danger to life and limb, and after about half an hour the world seemed very much brighter.
Of course Easter or not, it was still Clean Sheets Day, although I decided that the migraine provided sufficient excuse for not bothering about the dusting and hoovering, so they can wait until tomorrow. I washed the sheets and ignored the dust, and when Oliver eventually emerged he kindly volunteered to come to the farm with me for some more firewood.
It was raining, so we decided we would not hang around very long, and in any case Oliver had got to go to work. I showed him how to use the Barbie chainsaw, which turned out to work very much better once I remembered that you needed to put the battery in. He was entirely impressed with this, it is a sort of fairy wand for lumberjacks. You wave it around and everything makes a horrible noise and falls to pieces.
Oliver sawed up pallets whilst I dragged lengths of timber out of the stack where Mark had piled them all flat and covered them with a large sheet of plastic. I was just tugging the first one out when there was an anguished scrabbling noise, and I looked underneath the plastic to discover an enormous pair of anxious brown eyes staring back at me.
It was a baby rabbit, squished tightly between the planks, having obviously found somewhere comfortably warm and dry to sit out the Lake District springtime.
I always remember Mark’s observation that wild animals feel about us the way we would feel if we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by giant spiders, and so tried very hard to be quietly unthreatening and inconspicuous, presumably with no success whatsoever. It is hard not to be noticed when you are a sky-high monster waving a chainsaw.
Roger Poopy had no such scruples, and despite being instructed at increasing volumes to desist, he spent the next hour trying very hard to become better acquainted with the rabbit, determinedly digging his way underneath the plastic and snuffling excitedly at the place which it had presumably long-since abandoned, making hopeful little yelping noises. Eventually I got fed up with him and dragged him bodily away to the other side of the gate. Even then he spent the next ten minutes trying to return by stealth, tiptoeing discreetly up to the top of the garden and trying to wriggle back under the fence.
The last rabbit he caught finished up as a revolting pile of sick in the back of Oliver’s car on the way home. Even had I not had sympathetic animal-loving principles there were absolutely no circumstances under which he was going to be allowed the thrill of that particular chase.
Eventually we had filled the back of the taxi, and set off back, the dogs galloping enthusiastically in our wake. We dumped them at home and rushed up to Booths, in the hope of some shopping before the ridiculously early holiday closure.
We were not very successful. The tourist locust-plague had been there first, and the shelves were as empty as a taxi driver’s bank account in January.
There was neither bread, cheese nor fruit, although to my colossal relief there were still chocolate buttons, which I am currently eating for dinner.
I sawed up the firewood and Oliver went to work, and in no time at all the day was over and it was time to collect together chocolate buttons, tea and a pocket full of drugs, and to depart for the taxi rank, which is currently an oasis of undisturbed tranquillity.
I would have liked to make some money but frankly this is nicer.
I am going to read my book now.
