It rained, and it carried on raining and raining all day.
Instead of trying to stagger around in the mud of the front garden we went shopping instead, and I am feeling very happy with my world.
It was the nicest sort of shopping because it was just for things that we want instead of featuring largely the sort of things that nobody cares about like soap powder and loo roll and toothpaste.
I do not care about those at all at the moment, which will probably change in about two weeks’ time when I am very likely to be assailed by a sudden, and probably overwhelming, anxious preoccupation with loo roll.
I will start thinking about it when that moment comes. It is a problem for next week, and today nothing could have been further from our minds. Mark had some birthday cash, and we set about spending it.
We bought some new glasses and some plants.
I am afraid that sentence does not do justice to the excitingness of the experience. I will have to explain further.
We have become admirers of a type of glassware called Grasmere, which is hand made by lead crystal glass makers in Ulverston. It is so beautiful to look at that it makes me feel a little fluttery inside when I see it, and it sits so perfectly in the hand when you drink that it makes the whole experience of quaffing gin quite unexpectedly joyful and different. Because of this we have established an arrangement with eBay that they very kindly send us an email every time somebody is selling a piece, so that we can have a look to see if it is one of the ones that are on my Things I Wish For list.
Today we went to the glass makers. We had a bottle top with a tiny chip out of it that needed to be ground down, and also we wanted to see what exciting glasses they had got.
We do not buy the newly-finished, first-quality, only-for-the-nobility glasses. Those are hand made to order. When somebody wants some of those they telephone the glass makers, sell a couple of state secrets to the Russians and a couple of their children to Eastern European slave traders and then empty the whole lot out of their bank into the glass makers’ overdraft, because anybody doing something so gloriously skilled and lovely has got to have an overdraft. Then they wait until their new glasses have been forged on the hot anvil, or whatever glass makers do.
We buy the ones that the glass makers decided were not good enough for those people. Usually, the chap told us, when they make six for somebody with a very lot of cash, there are a couple that aren’t quite good enough, and they get sold to peasants like us.
Except you have got to be a peasant who has just won the lottery, even for those.
We bought some new wine glasses today, and put in an order for some stunningly beautiful bowl shaped glasses for gin cocktails. We ordered two of those, but in the end we will need four, because you can’t give your guests glasses from Asda whilst sipping your own champagne cocktails from hand-cut crystal, although I think I might have to like somebody very much before I managed to resist the temptation.
We stared longingly at the champagne glasses and the sherry glasses, but they will have to wait until we have found out some state secrets to sell to the Russians.
After that we went to the garden centre and bought some lavender plants to put in the new front garden. This is coming along beautifully, if you are the sort of person who finds a sea of mud beautiful. At the moment, because of the Lake District summertime, it is a sodden, black, slimy hole, but I have faith that it will become beautiful in time, especially with the addition of a few lavender plants and some sage.
All in all it was a very satisfactory sort of day.
It is now half past three in the morning. The night was less satisfactory. I had two flat tyres and got stuck in a ditch, these were separate incidents, so Mark had to rescue me twice, but all was well in the end, and it was a jolly good job that he was not on an oil rig. We compelled a taxi driver with an identical car and an inability to say No to people, to lend us his spare wheel, and so I managed to make it through the night.
Really it was very kind of him. We will have to buy him a bottle of wine tomorrow.
Tomorrow will be busy. Mark is going to the scrap yard to find another wheel.
It will be fine.
