I got soaked to the skin today.
This did not happen on my morning walk, which although cold and blustery, with weather that would not have disgraced November, was mostly dry.
It happened in Booths car park an hour or so later.
All I did was scurry across the sodden car park with my overflowing bags of shopping, and by the time I got back to the car I looked as though I had enjoyed the sort of night where one is too intoxicated by the end to remember to undress before getting in the shower.
I looked at the cascading heavens – or rather, I didn’t, I would probably have drowned if I had tried to look upwards – and felt that we ought really to rethink our plans for living somewhere warm and sunny. Anywhere would be an improvement on this at the moment.
I shoved the now watery shopping on the seats and sat in the taxi for a minute, trying to get my breath and staring at the waterfall rushing down the windscreen.
When I had unpacked it took me ages just to get the shopping bags dry, and the bananas looked as though they had been picked in a monsoon.
I had to go shopping because of Mark’s imminent return, and because of his preferences for sausages and other dead things. I do not really eat many dead things, not because of the principle of the wickedness of dead-thing-eating, but because they make me fat and give me indigestion, although it does not stop me trying whenever somebody else is paying for dinner.
I am still not thin, despite weeks and weeks of my chocolate-button void wilderness. I have not eaten a single chocolate thing for absolutely ages, even on my birthday when I might have had an excuse, and yet I am as portly as ever. I think I am just going to have to resign myself to rotundity. If I am going to be rounded I might as well just eat chocolate buttons whilst I am bouncing around the taxi rank.
After I had dried off we went out to vote.
Oliver has not done much voting in his life so far, and it was a new experience. I resisted the temptation to write I Think You Are All Awful on the ballot paper, and instead voted properly, like a sensible grown up, but it was a close run thing, I can tell you. I do not think I have ever before been compelled to vote in an election where the result will be colossally depressing no matter who wins. It does not matter who we vote for here anyway, the shocking twerp who always wins in Westmorland will be elected again regardless. I do not know why he is so popular, possibly because he has never actually mentioned any political opinions at all, but nevertheless turns up to every single local event and beams at the cameras. I write to him fairly regularly, expressing my outrage at some newly ghastly local or national policy, and his minions reply, pretending it is from him, and telling me he is busily striving to make the world a better place and have I seen everything wonderful he is doing at the hospital?
I do not know what he is doing at the hospital but it is certainly not that wonderful. Our GP referred me to see a neurologist last October, and when we got to June I telephoned the hospital to find out why I hadn’t had an appointment.
A slightly shame-faced sounding chap explained that it was because Cumbria did not actually have a neurologist. He promised that when eventually they managed to persuade one to relocate to Barrow they would hand him the waiting lists of everybody who had not actually died in the meantime.
I am fifty nine now. The prospect of me becoming old and dying whilst on the waiting list is now entirely real.
Anyway, we voted, which was an unexpected pleasure, because the lady who used to work in the bank before it closed was on the desk, and we exchanged cheerful greetings. Then on our way out we saw Nigel from the Post Office, which reminded us that Oliver needed to go and get his Travel Money Card, for his Japanese trip in a few weeks.
He is off earning money today. He is working in the bar until ten and then dashing over to Kendal to be a security guard for the vote count, so he will be right in the thick of being in the Room Where It Happens.
What a momentous day he will have had.
