I do hope that I am not speaking prematurely when I tell you that the terrible canine Poo Plague seems to have abated.
We have not had an accident in the house all day.
So far, that is.
In fact it has been rather a splendid day. We have not had snow, although it is desperately cold, and this morning the fell was hard and slippery underfoot. I was wearing my sheepskin mittens, and wished I had a matching hat, because, a chill little breeze bit my ears and my nose leaked. The tarn was frozen. The skies were ice-blue and the lake black and uninviting far below, and I was not sorry when I reached the last peak and could turn homewards.
Mark has spent most of the day out of doors, wearing his heavy boots and a woolly hat and boiler suit. He has been to see a man about some trees. A chap on the side of the fell has had some trees cut down. He has kindly given them to us if we can take them away, and so Mark and his friend with a tractor and a huge tree-trailer are going to collect them next week. They will take them to be stacked at the farm, where they will slowly be dried and split, and keep us in firewood for the next couple of years.
This is a very good thing, I can tell you. A good stack of firewood is indescribable wealth. It is carefree central heating and dry washing and hot water and a warm conservatory for months and months.
He has spent much of the rest of the day sharpening his collection of chainsaws.
I did some cooking to warm me up. I cooked potatoes to shove in Mark’s dinners, and made pancakes and sushi for mine, because I do not eat huge dinners of potatoes and beefburgers and sausages, all topped off with a pancake and a sausage roll. I like all of those things but I would need to come out at Christmas dressed in a circus tent if I ate them every dinnertime.
Mark eats all of these things but has still lost weight during his Norwegian adventure. He says that he has eaten lots and lots of puddings so the work must have been hard because he is thinner anyway.
We went out for dinner last night at the Indian restaurant, which was very good. We almost always go there when we go out for dinner, because it is friendly and we can catch up on gossip in between poppadoms, and also it is reassuringly inexpensive. It had to be inexpensive, because Mark’s last job has not paid yet, and they are muttering and mumbling about delays in the Norwegian tax system.
We are privately of the opinion that the delays are because of the company’s incompetence, but we are not going to say anything about that, at least not until after we have managed to extract the cash from them, which might take some time at their current speed.
We did not stay out for very long because Mark is still jet-lagged from several weeks of night shifts, and when we got home Oliver called us to tell us about his first placement. He is working in a primary school, which he is enjoying very much. He thinks that the children do not do nearly enough outdoor charging about, at least compared to Aysgarth, where regular readers will remember he attended prep school. His school was all boys, and since they were boarders, the staff had a vested interest in making sure they were all exhausted by bedtime. Hence he is busily dreaming up lots of outdoor running-around activities, and even if the children were not exhausted by bedtime, he most certainly was.
We were exhausted as well, and since we were not at work, we also went to bed early, where we slept like drunks on New Year’s Day for ten whole hours.
Life is beginning to look very promising. We are warm, and well-fed, and well-rested.
There can be no better way of starting on the winter.
PS. I was premature about the accidents.
