Well, today did not go at all as planned, and I can assure you that I had made some jolly thoughtful plans for it. There had been all manner of Good Intentions, and it turns out that they had merely been paving stones on my tragically inevitable personal route to the afterlife.
We had rushed through all of our jobs on Saturday in a frantic hurry to get everything finished before Mark buzzed off back to the distant North Sea. We did not manage this, obviously, and all sorts of things, mostly creative repairs to the new taxi, had to be put aside, with resigned sighs, to await his return in three weeks’ time.
We are accustomed to this. Failure is always an option, soldier.
We had even made careful plans to get up with the lark in order to remedy the most urgent failures, and decided to leave work early. The nightclub is open until three, but we abandoned its devotees to their pedestrian fate at two o’clock and came home for an early night.
It was not a very early night. Even after we had finished early, by the time we had emptied the dogs and washed up and faffed about with the fire and the washing and our ablutions, it was still four o’clock.
We did not make an early start.
We slept and slept, and were finally stirred into life at about half past eleven, by some noisy passers-by rabbiting outside our bedroom window. We have spotted this before. There is a very lot of Windermere in which people can wander around and talk about things, but nevertheless anybody with something loud and urgent to say always seems to pick the pavement right outside our bedroom window to inform the universe about it.
We staggered, rather guiltily, into life and Mark went downstairs to put the kettle on.
I checked our emails in case we had won the lottery, which we hadn’t, and discovered, to my surprise, an email from Mark’s employer, explaining that his helicopter flight had been changed and that he would not now be going until Thursday.
For any putative correspondents, I always check Mark’s emails for him, because he never, ever bothers to check them for himself, so if you think that you might want to write to him, don’t say anything that you wouldn’t want to say in front of me.
You can console yourself by remembering that at least he will know that you have written to him, which is an improvement on the blissful ignorance which would be the result if he was left to get on with it by himself.
We returned to bed for a coffee which suddenly had no urgency whatsoever, and felt peculiarly cast adrift, as the plan for the day dissolved into an unexpected absence.
Of course I was pleased that Mark was not being whisked off into the distant north, not least because he hasn’t yet finished laying the flags in the front garden, but nevertheless it took me a little while to re-establish my life goals in the new reality.
Not least was that I had only arranged to feed Mark until this morning, at which point everything ran out.
I should have gone to Booths, but I didn’t.
I went over the fells with the dogs whilst Mark faffed about with the paving flags in the front garden, which is beginning to look a bit better. You can get nearly all the way to the front door without getting your feet wet now.
It has rained a lot lately, and we got very muddy on the walk as well. Indeed, I stood in one muddy spot, usually perfectly passable, where my boot sank in so far that the mud went over the top of it and made my socks muddy. They have dried out now but have still got some uncomfortably crispy bits.
Rosie had to swim for several bits of the walk, and Roger Poopy got chased by a wet, grumpy cow. He promptly hid behind me, for which I was not at all grateful, and some flapping and cow-deterrence became necessary.
It was so late by the time I got back that I had hardly finished my breakfast and the laundry when it was time to start getting ready for work again, and so all of my determined plans for tidying up after Mark’s departure, and making a start on all of the jobs on my new List, had to be abandoned.
I am going to try again tomorrow, even though he is still here.
I do not know where the time goes.
