Dearie me, today has been a day of wickedness.
As you know, Mark should have gone back to work, but did not. Instead he is being retained on what is optimistically called Standby, by which his employers mean that he is being paid a full wage whilst being required to put in no effort whatsoever.
This is just about the best possible way of earning a living that it is possible to imagine. The only way we have ever achieved it in the past was when the Prison Service decided that I was too rascally to be allowed actually to work in prisons, but not rascally enough to be sacked, and hence dithered about it for three largesse-stuffed months.
Oil rigs pay even better than the Prison Service.
Hence, although there were all sorts of things that we should have done today, somehow it felt all right not to do any of them.
We had planned to go out last night as a sort of farewell dinner, but then Oliver went to work and it turned out that we didn’t need to say farewell anyway, so we didn’t. Instead we started a trend by loafing about quite spectacularly. We ate shepherd’s pie which I had saved in the freezer and drank something I found in a jam jar at the back of the fridge.
I had got no idea at all what this latter was. I had a vague recollection that it had been left over from Christmas, but which actual event escaped me.
It was pink, and sticky, and was clearly a home-made concoction of some kind. It quickly became clear that most of it was gin, and the rest might have been some kind of blackcurrant syrup, possibly enlivened with a dash of lemon. I don’t know what it was but it sloshed down very easily and made me feel mildly intoxicated.
I was very glad to have the jam jar back afterwards. It is a usefully large one that I generally fill with mayonnaise.
We occupied ourselves by watching an endlessly long series on Netflix, because we kept imagining that it would get interesting, which it didn’t.
It was called Alias Grace, and it was complete tripe. It was sold as being an exploration of split personality, which defence had been employed by a girl accused of murder, and it was drivel from beginning to end, so don’t bother.
It was the sort of dramatic story in which you know that a character is good because they are a rabid left-wing revolutionary, where women are cast into despair because they are obliged to wear corsets which makes them feel repressed, and where the farmstead is so badly run that there would be no question of any of the inhabitants surviving the first frost of winter. There was one scene where you were supposed to be sympathetically inclined towards a chap who was trying his hand at tap dancing in the barn, on the floor above the heroine who was milking a cow. Quite apart from getting up before the bucket had any milk in it at all, certainly not the gallon or so that her cow would have provided, she never once bellowed up the stairs that his banging about was filling her bucket with dust and straw, even though we could all see it drifting down and making a complete mess of the milk. She hardly seemed to notice, and she left the poor cow with her udder looking uncomfortably tight, the rotter.
In short, it was run the way a farm might be run if it was staffed by a team of scriptwriters from North London whose dietary needs were more than provided for by Waitrose and Costa Coffee, and it made the rest of it into nonsense. You can’t traipse about the fields sticking flowers in your hair when the wheat is bent over and ready, because you need to get it in before you get weather or before next door’s pig escapes, and it was more than obvious that not a single person on the set had ever really tried to make butter.
Despite the on-screen nonsense, we had a good night. It is hard to have a bad night when you are probably drinking blackcurrant gin and eating chocolates, and then when we woke up this morning we did not leap out of bed shouting Hail Shining Morn.
We sat around in bed for absolutely ages, drinking coffee and contemplating the world.
I will not tell you how long we sat there. It was so long that it embarrassed even us when we noticed, and in the end we had to get up because the poor dogs were becoming cross-eyed as well as cross-legged.
I took them out over the fell. They behaved like idiots.
A cow chased them and it served them right.
