Portly

Short diary tonight.

No excuse, except I can’t be bothered and I am on holiday so that is all right, if I don’t want to bother with things I can do exactly nothing and that is all right.

I expect you are frantically reading over your cornflakes, though, desperate to hear whether we slept well and what we have had for breakfast and I don’t want to disappoint you.

I know you aren’t really. Whatever you might say about these pages, suspense-filled and thrilling probably wouldn’t be on the list. Last night’s ending was hardly a cliff-hanger.

I will tell you anyway.

This place is glorious.

It is like Balmoral might be if somebody had spent some cash getting a decent heating system put in.

It is truly magnificent.

We woke up late this morning, because my phone had gone flat after so much sat nav and excited WhatsApp witterings, and so we should have dashed down to breakfast, but we didn’t. We ambled down slowly, and I had the most enormous breakfast of scrambled egg and kippers.

Mark had the sausages and bacon, obviously.

I do like eating. We had massive platefuls of food and then two pots of coffee with more toast.

Life has no greater joy.

It really doesn’t. All sorts of things are jolly nice but eating is right up there in the top few.

Afterwards I felt guilty about so much unadulterated hedonism, so we went to the spa.

We sloshed up and down the pool for a while until I had digested my guilt, and then went and sat in the hot tub.

Then we tried the sauna, then the steam room, and then plunged into the cold water outdoor pool.

That was so exciting I could hardly walk afterwards. My head was fuzzy and I was staggering. It was all very splendid.

After that we polished ourselves thoroughly with upmarket soaps and went off to York.

We ambled around the Christmas markets where we bought some candles, which you always buy on Christmas markets, and some dried oranges to make our house smell of dried oranges instead of dog poo.

We bumped into Elspeth on the Christmas markets.

Elspeth does not live in York. She had just come to do some personal hedonism of her own, although on a smaller scale than ours because she was planning to go and sleep on her son’s sofa and not in a colossally expensive mansion where everybody wears waistcoats and calls you Madam.

Afterwards we went off to a very nice pub near the hotel. We have been there before. It is called the Blue Lion, and it is brilliant. Their chef used to be the chef at a splendid place in Windermere called the Gilpin, and he looked at us as though we were vaguely familiar, which we were because we have taken him home after some of his more rambunctious nights out but we were not going to say that, and we left him feeling vaguely puzzled.

Bizarrely there was another of our taxi customers in the bar as well. I did not recognise him at first, but he was very surprised to see me.

We ate the most divinely splendid dinner. Mine was so middle class I have got no idea what it actually was but it was wonderful. It was the sort of gravy that is called Jus, and something else made out of truffles and cheese, followed by chocolate.

We ate so much we couldn’t even eat the chocolates that they gave us with coffee.

We have eased ourselves comfortably into bed.

The springs are creaking.

We have become very round.

We are going to go back to the exercise place in the morning and try and waddle it off.

I am having the most magnificent holiday.

Yours sincerely,

Portly.