Happy ever after

For the benefit of those who are anxious I shall tell you right here and now that Mark did indeed manage to fix the car in the nick of time, enabling us to go out to work on New Year’s Eve and earn ourselves some last drips of seasonal cash.

Indeed, I have even put a spoiler in the title.

Actually it wasn’t just in the nick of time at all, that only happens in the sort of films where the writers have been told to insert plenty of jeopardy. In fact it was done by lunchtime. It was a truly horrible job. We had to get up early, to order the part from Autoparts at eight in the morning so that it would turn up on one of the first vans, and Mark struggled outside to lie in a puddle underneath the car whilst I went off over the fells with the dogs.

The struggle and the puddles, as doubtless you will know if you are anywhere in the UK, and I jolly well wish I wasn’t, were because yesterday was one of the most shockingly inclement meteorological moments of the whole year, just to boot 2024 out with a welcome thump. Rain poured down, the winds howled, and the Lake District, presumably along with many other places, was not a nice place to be.

I struggled to get up the fell in the face of the wind, and when I got there I had to fight to get on to the rocks at the top. When I did, I staggered about for about three seconds before I was blown off in a lash of stinging rain.

It was wonderful to come home and to be in the hush of the house, with no sound but the crackling of the fire and the endless squeaking of the poopies, which is a bit like having tinnitus, it just doesn’t stop.

Mark was not outside for very much longer than I was. Half an hour after I came home he staggered in, dripping and swearing, but with the taxi once again returned to roadworthiness, much to all of our relief.

After that there was nothing to do but get ready for work, which we did, and since we were an hour early we did not rush out to the taxi rank but went back to bed to try and bank some sleep before the long night.

It was deathly quiet for hours and hours. Half a dozen taxis sat on the taxi rank. It was too wet to talk to one another, and there were no customers. Everybody went to one place and stayed there for the whole evening.

Of course we went down to the water’s edge for the fireworks at midnight, just as we do every year, only this year it was a bit different because there was only me and Mark. Oliver was still standing menacingly in front of the doors at the local bar, and the other children were all off on projects of their own.

There was almost nobody there. There was a small huddle of umbrellas and a police car, all of us staring at the dark skies through the pounding rain.

All the same, the fireworks were truly brilliant, and I thought with some smug satisfaction about all of the cowardly Health And Safety authorities who had cancelled theirs. Ours were spectacular, huge and bright, as if Windermere was saying Up Yours to everywhere else in the country.

After that we were suddenly very busy. Of course nobody wanted to walk home in the rain, and we were dashing about until four o’clock in the morning, with the consequence that today has been very short.

Fortunately we were spared too much in the way of domestic labour because our neighbour very kindly offered to cook our dinner for us. You will not be surprised to hear that we accepted with immediate enthusiasm. It is a long time since anybody in this house has cooked anything except sausages.

In fact they brought dinner over here, because our house is warmer than theirs, and we had a very convivial evening drinking away the last of the Christmas spirit, and eating an absolutely excellent dinner. There was even a bit left which I have saved for tomorrow.

We did not bother about work. We thought that we had done enough.

A final note, because it made me laugh. I mentioned to a writing friend, from the Master’s’s’ degree course, that I had been kept busy over Christmas because I had a  pen full of puppies.

It took her a while to understand what I was talking about.

She thought it was an exotic sort of term for writer’s block.

This pleased me very much.