Lucy has gone, and I am in the middle of the first night of the noisy Bank Holiday roister-doistering.
I am not going to write very much in these pages because I keep being interrupted. This is, from my point of view, a good thing, unless the interruption is somebody tapping on the window to ask irritatingly stupid questions, like What Time Does The Bus Come? the answer to which is never going to be a helpful one, coming from a taxi driver.
There are a very lot of people here, talking loudly and laughing and singing with merry holiday lightheartedness. Indeed, I have been interrupted half a dozen times even since the last sentence. Most of these interruptions were not asking about buses. Indeed, several indignants appear to have been abandoned by the bus service, whose drivers have given up trying to manage the crowds, and who have twice just driven past without stopping.
I sympathise wholeheartedly. They are not, after all, paid more money per passenger. From their point of view, very definitely, the fewer Bank Holiday muppets they have got to put up with, the better.
In any case, it has been such a quietly uneventful day that I really do not have a very lot to tell you. There were no menacing cows on our morning trot up the fell, and so it passed without anxious incident. Rosie splashed about in the tarn, and the day was fine. It was a glorious sense of freedom to be able to walk without jackets. I have been staggering up there in my heavy coat and boots for such a long time that it feels wonderfully lightweight. We came back for an early afternoon breakfast of porridge and cups of tea, and passed a peaceful half an hour sitting in the conservatory, watching the cats thoughtfully patrolling the place-where-there-might-be-mice in the wood stack. Lucy approved the curtain material selected for her living room, and then that was that. She loaded the fiercely resentful cats into their basket and disappeared.
It is not a very long disappearance. She is coming back on Sunday. We have been invited to Elspeth’s daughter’s birthday on Wednesday, so Lucy is going to revise for her exams in our house, where she can concentrate because somebody else dusts and cooks dinner.
I contemplated inviting myself to stay with my own mother for the same purpose whilst I finish my dissertation, but decided against it.
I am sure she will be relieved to hear it.
I was supposed to be writing my dissertation when Lucy had gone, but I didn’t. Instead I went to bed and slept, soundly, until it was time to go to work. I felt guilty about this at the time but I am glad of it now, because it is the very middle of the night, and I am not yet yawning and looking hopefully towards the clock.
I have written some bits of my dissertation in between customers and in between writing to you, but like this entry, it is hardly the stuff that classic literature is made of, because of the Bank Holiday, as already discussed at some length.
I will do it tomorrow, just like Lucy’s revision.
PS. I have spoken to Mark. He has been fishing. He says there are so many fish that you practically have to fight them off.
He is having a nice time.
