Goodness, I do not know to whence the evening has vanished.
A mere five minutes ago I was chugging wearily on to the taxi rank, thinking I had better write to you, and now it is almost eleven o’clock, and the evening has fled away like a rat unexpectedly discovered in the compost heap.
I have been quite remarkably busy.
I have had customers almost all the way through, and one of them went miles and miles away, to Ulverston, so I can go to Booths tomorrow, as well as paying the overdraft and not instead of, so hurrah for the chap going to the monastery.
Mark has gone off to Scotland again, and my world has become a little quieter and I am trying not to feel bereft. Obviously I am not very bereft, instead of Mark’s presence I have got a reassuring wage packet coming in regularly, which I don’t mind telling you is very welcome indeed, but I am still feeling a little forlorn.
I have not seen very much of him in any case. Mostly he was either fixing Lucy’s house or collecting the new axle for the camper van. You will be pleased to hear that he has not left this in the garden. He has taken it up to his field and left it there where it can upset the National Park until he gets back. This will not be for another three weeks. The helicopter leaves tomorrow morning.
He came with me on my walk over the fell this morning, although we had to be quite hasty because we were getting very late because of not waking up until almost lunchtime, and actually the walk wasn’t this morning at all, it was this afternoon. I still said Morning to people when we passed them but it was just out of habit and actually it was an optimistic fib.
This meant that the washing had not dried properly when I had to rush out and drag it in out of the rain this afternoon, and it is still dangling about the kitchen being damp even now, although that state of affairs is going to change because we have finally bought some new dehumidifiers. Our house needs these because of being half underground in the wettest county in the country, and the last one died in a choking spasm of burning rubber and motor- crunching last year. It has taken us this long to save up enough for some new ones.
They arrived this afternoon, and they are now looking incongruously white and gleaming against the dusty orange backdrop of the rest of the house. When we started the one in the kitchen it said that there was ninety two percent humidity and immediately set to work, whirring and grumbling to itself and wondering if its new home was really going to be worth all of the effort that was obviously about to be demanded of it.
I am very pleased. The house gets cold and full of greasy black mould when it is damp, and these will help very much.
I was so busy cooking things and dashing about collecting up things that I had forgotten Mark would need to take with him, that I did not get any more of my administration done, except for a prolonged discussion with the bank about PINs and debit cards. They made me try and pay some money into it, and then to try and buy something, and it wouldn’t do either so in the end they decided that there was a fault on the chip, which was an encouraging result, I was so pleased to discover that I wasn’t just an idiot I didn’t mind about the card not working at all, and they are going to send us another one tomorrow.
This will be too late for Mark but he does not need any money on the oil rig anyway.
It is almost midnight now, and I have got a customer to be collected, so I am going to leave you.
With any luck tomorrow will see some administrative headway.
