Last night was very busy indeed. I mean, really busy, as busy as a really busy Bank Holiday, and I was worn out when I staggered to bed, somewhere around five.
It was so busy that although I am not really expecting more of the same this evening, I am writing this now, at home, before I set off, just in case. I didn’t even get time to drink my flask of tea last night, never mind compose thoughtfully inspirational words of wisdom or even write in here.
I earned lots of money and have already spent it all, on eBay, purchasing suits for Oliver and Mark. Mark no longer has a suit and the tiresome summer shenanigans at Gordonstoun is Smart Dress but not Black Tie, which is an absolute nuisance, because really Mark only does Black Tie or Oily.
Oliver has got a smart jacket but not a suit so I have purchased suits for both of them, from a retiring tailor who is getting rid of his last couple of bits of stock, which, fortuitously, were in Mark’s and Oliver’s sizes, the Gods of Second Hand Bargain Hunting must have been watching and feeling kindly disposed.
I loathe the current trend of calling second hand stuff Pre Loved. If somebody had loved it they wouldn’t have given it to Age Concern. I never give anything that I love to charity shops, only old junk that I probably never really wanted in the first place.
Anyway, these are new, and massively reduced, and nobody has loved them and the tailor was sick of having them cluttering up his spare bedroom.
I hope they fit. They look very splendid. I have started looking for shirts now. Mark likes Turnbull & Asser shirts. If you want to know why they are best purchased on eBay you can look up the price of the new ones. They are very lovely shirts.I have been trying to find out Oliver’s collar size but he appears to be in the middle of some rascally youthful behaviour and has not got round to telling me. He did, however, send me some photographs of himself and his best friend chortling into the camera. I am very glad I do not have to run a boys’ boarding house.
This has occupied a good deal of my day. I went for my usual morning walk over the fells this morning, which took ages, because I kept bumping into people I know, and spent ages standing on the paths exchanging gossip whilst our dogs charged about barking at one another and sniffing each other’s bottoms. This happens when we have got lots of visitors here. All of the residents consider one another to be practically first cousins until everybody else has buzzed off and we can get on with squabbling again.
It has rained quite a bit in the last few days, and when I got home I had to put my socks on the kettle to dry them out. I learned to do this at school. It was one of the more useful bits of my education, certainly it has come in handy more often than knowing how to calculate the area of an isosceles triangle, which, incidentally, I don’t any more, possibly a square hypotenuse or a square Pye, but since I have completely forgotten what a hypotenuse is I will never again be able to do it without looking on Google.
I am staying off the Internet for a while. It has just cost me a fortune.
In other news, I have been making some serious efforts to become thinner. I have not eaten a chocolate button for days and days now, and indeed have stopped eating everything that the august Daily Telegraph Health Page says is bad for me. My current diet is Fish, followed by Vegetables, followed by Fruit, with Porridge Sweetened By Adding Yoghurt for breakfast. I have even stopped eating cheese sandwiches.
It is, to my surprise, nicer than I had expected, which would not have been difficult. The only problem is that I do not seem to have lost a single ounce, if you discount the three dress sizes I dropped when I took my winter clothes off. I had thought I might have become supermodel-slim by the time Mark got home, I certainly feel as though I would be entitled to be after all that effort, but in fact I am going to be just as portly as ever, what a shocking waste of vegetables that has turned out to be.
I am not discouraged. I will keep it up until Mark gets home, when I will not have the time to faff about cooking vegetables, because I will be occupied organising sausages, biscuits and all of the stuff he eats.
I don’t suppose it will matter if it isn’t making any difference.
I heard the first cuckoo yesterday.
