Nameless

I have not got much of my new website development done today, although I can tell you that it is occupying every single minute of my waking thoughts. I have planned it and contemplated it, and tried to work out the bits I am doing wrong, and written things and crossed things out and sighed and considered it, but in the end I suppose that really I have not actually achieved very much.

This is partly because Mark is at home and we spend an awful lot more time sitting about drinking coffee than I would contemplate when I am by myself.

We do not drink coffee during the day, just in bed, first thing in the morning when we wake up. We have done this for years and years but stopped when life became prohibitively busy. Now that Mark is not at home quite so much we can do it again, and it is lovely to be so gloriously, uninhibitedly idle, especially at this time of year, when the birds are nesting, and we can watch them flapping about and trying to stuff sticks into everybody’s chimney. We used to sit in bed and watch our neighbours going up and down the street whilst we speculated about their activities, but we do not have very many neighbours any more because most of the street has been sold as holiday cottages now, and nobody cares what tourists are doing.

There were no tourists at all on my walk this morning, because it was raining. They are getting in the taxi this evening and grumbling about the weather, as if they had expected the Lake District to be balmily welcoming in March, and they are surprised that it isn’t.

The dogs have been behaving quite well now that Mark is home, mostly I think because they are getting a very lot of exercise at the moment, and are too tired to be as stroppy and argumentative as usual.

They are not only going for their morning walk over the fells. When we got back yesterday Mark took them to the farm with him and booted them out to gallop behind his taxi for the last mile. When they got there he spent the day cutting logs up with his chainsaw and they charged about, rolling in molehills and barking at imaginary deer and hunting for rabbits.

They did the same today.

When they got home this evening they practically passed out on their cushion, the dogs, not Mark, obviously. They wolfed their dinner in noisily slurping mouthfuls and then collapsed.

They are no trouble at all unless you happen to trip over them.

The outcome of this has been that I have had a blissfully quiet day. I have done all sorts of useful things. I re-waxed all of my sandwich-wrapping cloths and cooked some lamb to put on sandwiches for Mark. I cooked this in the slow cooker, stuffed with garlic and rosemary and mints and dates, and it smelled splendid when it was done. I am trying to encourage Mark to eat healthy things. He is worried that he is getting fatter, although he really isn’t. The difficulty is that he doesn’t really like anything that is good for him. He would be very pleased to get to Heaven and discover that there was eternal feasting on pork pies and sausage sandwiches and chocolate biscuits.

I still haven’t got round to making biscuits.

Instead of making biscuits I dashed upstairs to continue with my websiting. I need to warn you that over the next few weeks I am going to take this page off my personal Facebook page and put it on its own Windermere Diaries page. This will mean that if you do not look for it then very probably you won’t find it, at least at first. I am going to try and make this change gradually with lots of warnings but unless I become horribly distracted it is going to happen.

I am even contemplating using a different name for writing my stories. I do not know what I would like to call myself but it needs to be something that will make people not think of me. I do not like personal questions at all, and if people in the taxi say things like What Are You Reading? I won’t tell them because it is too personal. Certainly I never tell any of them my name.

Hence I have been puzzling about this, in a half-hearted sort of way. If anybody has any sensible ideas I would be very pleased to hear them. Kindly do not suggest Eileen Dover and other such witticisms. I knew a lady who had the misfortune to marry into that name. Her son was not called Ben but that was what everybody called him anyway.

Answers on a postcard, please.