Perhaps if I had done the early-to-bed bit it might have been better.
All the same, I have discovered that I really do not like getting up early.
I suppose I have not so much discovered this as remembered it, it is a long time since I was obliged to set an alarm, and it was a very horrible experience indeed.
The alarm going off, I mean, obviously. There was nothing horrible about the setting of it, apart from a sort of mournful sinking feeling, as happens when one is anticipating something unpleasant, like the MOT failure sheet or a credit card statement.
When it actually did go off it was worse even than a credit card statement. It was a riotous jangling noise, cutting into my peaceful slumbers like a chainsaw through a rusty nail.
Five minutes later the second, emergency alarm did the same.
Of course I got up. I staggered about blindly, trying to find my clothes, which I had carefully laid out the night before in anticipation of that very moment. The dogs stared at me in horrified curiosity from their cushions for a minute, and then buried their heads again, intuiting, rather perceptively, I thought, that such middle of the night activity could not possibly be expected to include them.
When I got back an hour or so later they hadn’t moved, which I thought was very sensible.
I couldn’t even go back to bed then, because it was Clean Sheets Day, and part of the getting up process had been to drag the sheets off the bed in my wake, stuffing them dozily into the washing machine as I passed on my way out.
Of course after that the day was not an easy one. I was awake by the time I had driven from Ambleside to Oxenholme and back again, probably consciousness happened somewhere around Ings I think, but nevertheless I was definitely not bright and chirpy. I put my boots on and compelled the disbelieving dogs to get up, even though it wasn’t even nine o’clock, and we trailed off up the fell, where the early morning birds seemed to be making quite a shocking racket.
After that I did all the usual Monday things, like banking the weekend’s takings, and collecting the dry cleaning, and dusting things. The dusting was a trial, because of bending over to do the skirting boards, and I was feeling uncomfortably creaky, but I did it. There are now some bits of my house that are so clean they will not need to be done for another week.
When I had restored order I trailed upstairs to the attic to make some inroads into the ironing. This is still left over from the party some time ago, and has been burning a guilty hole in my conscience for some time now, but in fact it passed quite pleasantly.
One of the children has put Jurassic Park on the storytelling thing on my telephone. It is a thrillingly blood-curdling yarn, and I have been listening to it with bated breath. I have seen the film, albeit years and years ago, and liked it very much, it was a jolly good sort of American film with the hero dashing back into nail-biting peril to rescue terrified children from oversized and inexplicably murderous dinosaurs.
Even in the book the dinosaurs were a bit unnecessarily murderous, they seemed just to keep on killing one another and the occasional misfortunate person without ever bothering to stop actually to eat what they had just killed, which seemed to me to be an unlikely evolutionary imperative. My experience of predators, which is admittedly largely based on birds of prey and not many dinosaurs, is that once they are full of dinner, tasty looking things can dance about in front of them with complete impunity, and live to dance another day.
These dinosaurs did not do that, which was understandable from the point of view of squeezing as much terrifying jeopardy into a plot as it will possibly hold, rather like the washing machine on Clean Sheets Day, even if a bit improbable. Anyway, the result was quite an exhausting listen, but it certainly kept me awake, and I have been enjoying it very much. It is a lot better than the film, and I will be sorry when it has finished.
Certainly it made the ironing go with a swing.
