Number One Daughter has been doing self-abuse.
Yesterday she, and three equally unhinged soldierly companions, ran in something called an Ultra Run. This is a long, long running race, just over a hundred kilometres, in fact, which distance translates into English as sixty three miles.
I would be unlikely to attempt to walk that far.
She announced herself to be disappointed with her performance because her toenail came off and her knee became horribly swollen, meaning that they only came twenty first out of the three hundred teams who entered. The first twenty teams only included one other girl.
She said that she would have done better if her toenail had not come off, which is almost certainly true. When my toenail came off it did not occur to me to commence running from the Lake District to Manchester. Indeed, it barely occurred to me to limp across the road to the Post Office if I could persuade anybody else to go on my behalf.
I have been trying to express my awed pride on the telephone, although just about the only sentence that would come out was You Must Be Mental, especially as she has described her subsequent sufferings to me. Apparently it is such a long way that some people were still running this morning, although she thinks everybody has probably finished by now.
I have not run to Manchester although I did walk over the fells this morning. I like to think of myself as moderately fit for an old person, at least until I speak to any of the children. They make sure that I am under no illusions in that department.
It wasn’t actually this morning either, because I didn’t get up until lunchtime. I had a late night at work last night, and didn’t crawl into bed until almost six. It was a busy night, although not an especially pleasant one, because I am floundering through the last days of a migraine, which has been the final departing legacy of the Self Pitying Disease of the last week. I had drugged the worst of it away, but nevertheless it left me short-tempered and disinclined to agree with people that we live in a beautiful place, the hill from Bowness to Windermere can’t possibly be walked by somebody very fat who has a bad leg, and that yes, four o’clock in the morning is very late at night for a mere girl to be working.
In fact I was generally rather grumpy. I booted two lots of people out for no other reason than that they were being so tiresomely rude I just couldn’t bear their company any longer. They were upset about being booted out but not apologetic so I felt no need to relent. Also I got very cross with a Lakeside taxi who was very wickedly picking up passengers from the taxi rank when he is Not Allowed, so cross that I dashed off a complaint to the council on my lap top there and then. Hopefully they will have him put in the stocks, that will jolly well teach him.
I was not sorry when it was over and I could go home to try and soothe my ruffled spirits. I took the dogs around the Library Gardens and stole some leafy autumnal twigs to shove in flower arrangements today, because Mark is coming home tomorrow.
Lucy and Jack are at home again as well. We are going to go and look at a new stove together tomorrow. She would like a wood burning stove like ours, presumably because she feels her life to be incomplete without spending hours and hours of it standing in her back yard sawing up firewood on icy mornings. The wood burning stove shop, like everything in Windermere, is conveniently situated for our house, it is at the end of the alley. I rang the chap yesterday, but he is out fitting a flue pipe tomorrow and so his mum is going to pop round and open the shop up for us to have a look.
The looking process is a bit academic really because he has already told us what he thinks she should purchase. I am sorry that Mark will not be home in time because he knows all of the sensible questions, and I can never think of any, but perhaps Jack will think of some, he is interested in boilers.
I have left them getting excited about boilers and come out to work.
Mark comes home tomorrow.
Hurrah.
