The cherry blossom is out. It is the most glorious, wonderful springtime, and we are all suddenly awash with a splendid bath of Vitamin D.
The world is beginning to feel very beautiful indeed.
Also, to my enormous relief, we did not feel exhaustedly hung over this morning.
This was probably because actually we did not drink very much last night really.
We had Prosecco which we watered down liberally with soda water, and which worked very well, because it gave us the hedonistic happiness of drinking whilst having no effect whatsoever.
In fact I felt rather more guilty about the chocolate and the pudding with cream than I did about the alcohol. I like chocolate very, very much indeed but if I eat very much I quickly start to look like Harry Potter’s Uncle Vernon, with the red nose although not the moustache.
Chocolate does not give me a red nose. Wine does that.
Hence this morning I applied myself with energy, although without much enthusiasm despite the beaming encouragement of the sunshine, to my trek over the fells. I have recently added a third climb to my morning walk pattern, as I am sure I have told you, and every morning I look up at it wearily and wonder if it would be all right not to bother. Then I know that this would be shamefully idle and set off anyway.
This morning I knew there would be no avoiding it. If I am to walk off half a bottle of diluted grape-sugars and a large handful of Cadbury’s then high-speed uphill is the only acceptable expiation.
In the end of course it was lovely. The skylarks were in full voice and the sky so brightly clear that I could see the sparkling of the sea in the distance, and the new, fresh, green leaves are just beginning to unfold, enveloping the woods in a brilliant emerald veil.
This is a very good time of year to live in the Lake District.
I had shared the chocolate with Rosie, who did not seem to be in the least guilt-stricken, it must be very easy to be a dog. You don’t have to feel guilty about anything unless you poo on the floor.
Still it was nice to catch up with our neighbour. He is a good neighbour to have, and we are all united in not thinking very much of some of the other neighbours, so it was a pleasantly chatty evening, with occasional bursts of satisfactory malice.
It was a good job we were all right this morning, because Mark had to go and finish mending the trailer he has been working on, and I wanted to get on with my story-editing activities. This is too dull to tell you about. Nobody cares about sentence structure or indented paragraphs except me, and so I will not bore you. Suffice to say it took a very great deal of the afternoon, which was weary because the sun was shining and I kept thinking how very much I would like to be outside.
I couldn’t think of anything outside I would have liked to do, so I did not go. We are going to dig up the front garden and make some efforts to make it look better, at the moment the front of the house looks rather as though it has been uninhabited for about fifteen years. It all needs repainting. This is a job I have been dreading so much that Mark asked the painter at the end of the street if he would come and do it, but he said that nobody wants to do their own painting and that he is booked up for the next twelve months, so if any painters and decorators who happen to be at a loose end are reading this, you know where we live.
I could not dig up the front garden today anyway, because it is full to bursting of the sort of green shoots that will become bluebells in a month or two, and I most certainly do not want to upset them. The whole lot looks glorious for about three weeks every year, when the bluebells and the lilac and the magnolia are all in full bloom, after which it subsides into being a dock-leaf filled wilderness again.
We will dig it up when it gets to that.
In the meantime we will continue to consider the paint.
I do not much like that prospect, even in the sunshine.
