We did not go straight to the camper van this morning.
We went to the garden centre in Ambleside.
I do not usually approve of garden centres. They are absolutely cheating. If you can’t grow your own plants then you do not deserve to have them. In any case, ours is not really a garden centre, more an outdoor furniture shop, with a side order of bird tables.
I do not deserve a garden.
We purchased some plants.
I am embarrassed about this, but life is already so very full of things that I am supposed to be doing, if I start working in the garden I will not have any time left for sitting in bed and looking at it through the window.
We bought some asparagus crowns as well, by way of a sop to our consciences, also some dahlias. I like dahlias. My grandfather used to grow them for my grandmother, and the smell always reminds me of their house.
Mark grows daffodils for me. He brought lots of them home from the farm the other day, before the slugs got them. They are still bright and lovely, they must be pretty much the last daffodils in the UK except possibly for the ones on Orkney which never used to flower until June anyway.
We were buying plants because we had realised that after a promising start, the garden being full of beautiful blue hyacinths and cheery daffodils, once they all died off last week there is nothing flowering any more. Other things will come into flower soon, but there is a Gap, and we thought it needed to be filled.
It is important that the garden looks nice. I saw some people photographing one another underneath the arch the other day. Also I like to look at it out of the window whilst we are having our coffee. I do not want to look at stalks and remember the disappeared loveliness of last week.
We could have purchased seeds and planted them in the conservatory. Long-established readers might recall that this is where we have begun most of our plants in the past, however the conservatory is so full that there is barely room for Guffy the kitten to crawl between the stalks to poo in the flower beds, and also she likes to sleep on plants. There is a very squished spider plant left behind from where she has been pretending to be a hunting tiger on the African savannah.
I was about to tell you all about the day that followed, where we went to the camper van and Mark carried on constructing the door and I welded in the back windows, because the new welding lenses have at last arrived, but I can’t.
I can’t because I started to write this just after we came home. Then I stopped to have dinner, by which I mean that we collapsed in front of the television with huge plates of pasta and a glass of whisky and soda. This was followed by pudding and another whisky and soda, and now I have come back to you I am very drunk indeed.
I am not quite sure how that happened.
We did not mean to get drunk. We meant to lounge about watching an Amazon series that Mark likes about an improbable superhero called Reacher and then get an early night, but first there was the whisky, and then Mark remembered we had got some home made chocolate in the freezer, and now I have got blurred vision and indigestion.
It was a wonderful evening.
This is perhaps just as well, because Mark goes away tomorrow, and I have got a week of sensibly self-disciplined tedium to which I can look forward, so it might as well start off with a shocking hangover tomorrow.
I have stopped caring about diary writing. Dearie me, the world is fuzzy.
I accidentally set fire to Mark’s hand with the laser welder today.
I have forgotten everything else.
I will try and make more sense tomorrow.
