Booths seemed to have sold out of everything useful this afternoon, and so I thought I might try online shopping.
Since the world is your oyster when the mighty Internet is your highway, you can shop anywhere, it doesn’t matter if there is likely to be a parking space, I started off with Marks and Spencer. Usually I go into their actual shop, the one with thirty old ladies trying to work out how to get into their parking spaces without needing to worry about reversing later, but I have been into Kendal once this week, and I really can’t be bothered to trail in again when I have next got some cash and can afford the shops.
Usually I buy smoked trout and smoked mackerel from Marks and Spencer. I eat a jolly lot of this.
It was not a successful endeavour. When I put Trout into their online search engine it came up with some mysterious looking pots. These turned out, on inspection, to be anti-wrinkle cream, presumably related to Trout as in You Old.
It made me laugh anyway.
Marks and Spencer, it turned out, do not deliver food. It is the car park or nothing.
I tried Asda.
Asda does not have anything at all on their online shelves that anybody might want to purchase, or at least that I might want to purchase. Not only do they not do Ethically Sound Organic Prawns, We Promise They Have Not Been Hideously Ill-Treated In Some Wickedly Intensive Thai Prawn Farm, they had sold out of russet apples.
Inspection of the mighty Internet revealed that everybody has sold out of russet apples, it is that time of year.
I am sorry to say that I ordered some from an online and possibly suspect greengrocer. They will be the last of the year, if they are real and actually turn up. I had to pay an extra fiver to have them posted to me, so it was a costly luxury, but I was reluctant to return to ordinary rubbish apples any sooner than I had to.
I won’t do it again. That will be the end of joyous apple consumption for this year.
The process was not speeded up by the presence of a very noisily purring kitten on my knee, which limited my typing to the single-handed variety, because every time I stopped stroking it, it bit me. Poor Roger Poopy is very sad about the kitten. Not only does it not want him to love it at all, he can’t see why I might be quite happy to have the tiny kitten on my knee but not a large, wet, smelly dog, and he has been sitting beside me with the mournful expression of a faithful old friend who has suffered a shocking, and completely unexpected, betrayal.
Rosie, meanwhile, has been being very good indeed. It is the most enormous effort imaginable for her not to steal the kitten food, she has been gazing at its dish with so much longing that it makes her shiver, but so far she has managed to be restrained. I have been rewarding her with the occasional biscuit still left over from Christmas, the sort that nobody else is going to eat because they are just slightly soggy.
We all got soaked on our walk this morning, talking of soggy. It has rained so much all day that there are enormous puddles everywhere. I had been wearing all of my waterproofs to go over the fell, but when I got back I was still soaked to the skin, and had to strip everything off and hang it over the stove, so it was a good job we did not have any visitors.
It is still raining even now, hours and hours later, and I am on the taxi rank. Customers are few and far between, it is almost nine o’clock and so far there has only been one, but I am sanguine.
I am going to go away and read my book, which is a merry affair about psychopaths. It includes a link to an online test to see if you are a psychopath, which of course I did.
It was full of obvious questions like Do You Consider That Lots Of People Are Too Stupid For Their Opinions To Be Listened To? which I wouldn’t have expected would have prompted any discussion whatsoever, especially if you asked taxi drivers.
The result was that I scored ninety out of a hundred, and the conclusion suggested that I might like to consider therapy.
I am going to go and read some more.
