We have had a snow day.
It has been the best possible end to the holidays.
Actually the holidays should have ended already, and Oliver gone back to school today, but he didn’t. We looked at the traffic reports for queues on the motorways and decided that probably he could think of something more interesting to do than spend eight hours sitting in traffic jams, and so he has explained to school that we have had some weather, and he will go down tomorrow.
His lecture tomorrow is online in any case so he can do it from here without any problems.
I am afraid that it was a bit of a fib about the weather, though. All the absolute guff about Amber Warnings and Stay At Home and Danger To Life also turned out to be a fib, the sort of thing that newspapers resort to in desperation when absolutely nothing is happening in the world because of the Christmas holidays, and they need to upset people. In fact we had about two inches of snow which has already turned to slush.
Number Two Daughter called from Canada. They have got quite a lot of snow there, and it is minus fourteen degrees, but nobody is suggesting that the Canadians stay at home because their lives are endangered. They are all getting out and getting on with it.
Presumably they don’t need a gene pool full of the sort of people who run shrieking back to their bedrooms the minute the sun goes behind a cloud. Actually some people run back when the sun comes out as well, in case they get skin cancer.
Scary stuff, this weather.
Still, there was enough of it about to provide an entirely reasonable explanation for Oliver’s absence, and so he stayed here. He and Mark drove into Kendal to collect Lucy’s new car. Her old car has had a sad end. Jack very kindly bought it as a present for her, and very shiny and impressive it was as well, but shockingly, after a few weeks the engine blew up and she has been carless.
I forgot to tell you that Mark came home yesterday. He and Jack were supposed to be mending the old car, but after some days dismantling it and inspecting the damage, they decided that the new parts would be so expensive it would be better to scrap it and buy a new one, so Mark came home to work last night, which incidentally was rubbish, nobody wanted to go anywhere at all, and then today he and Oliver went to collect the new one, which is a mini which needs a new clutch.
We ordered the clutch from Autoparts and it is here already.
Misfortunately a tyre burst on the way home, and it doesn’t have a spare.
Mark said that the tyre burst because of a broken spring jabbing into it, so they sawed the spring off. They abandoned the car and tomorrow Mark is going to go to Lancaster to get a new tyre.
I did not help with all of the overalls and getting oily in the snow. I stayed at home.
I did not even go over the fell.
I had a cup of coffee in the morning, which was a great pleasure, and one that I have not done for weeks and weeks, and then when I had finished all of the laundry and mopping up poopy-puddles, not that the latter is ever finished, by the way, I went upstairs into the attic to do the ironing.
I have finished it.
Also I have repaired some clothes that were falling apart, hung everything up tidily on the rails, and made the attic feel lovely again. For weeks now it has been full of heaps of beautiful, abandoned clothes, crumpled and creased and forlorn, and they are now not only restored to their former glory, they are scented and pressed and hung in carefully-labelled plastic bags.
I am feeling very pleased with it indeed.
As if that wasn’t good enough, the day got better. We made a large curry for dinner, actually the result of mixing several tups of frozen leftovers out of the freezer, and settled down to watch Jilly Cooper’s Rivals on Lucy’s Disney Plus channel.
This was brilliant, and we all loved it, even though it finishes, inexplicably, halfway through the book. I am telling you this because it is the sort of spoiler that you need to know, you might be better to wait until they actually finish making it in 2026, it is worse than Game of Thrones for being abandoned halfway.
I did not mind that much, because I loved it, it was funny and very beautiful to watch, and I know what happens in the real end anyway.
It is almost three in the morning and we are just going to bed.
It has been the best, most idle, most splendid day, and I am feeling very happy.
I will not at all mind going back to work tomorrow.
I have had a holiday
