Well, the bank holiday is almost over, and I have survived.
It is hot.
Not as hot as it is in places like London, but by Lake District standards, it is very hot indeed.
It is wonderful.
It is only the afternoon, but I am sitting on the taxi rank in Bowness. Mostly this is because it is Double Time, but it is a little bit because there is nowhere nicer in the country to be sitting at the moment. I have got my feet comfortably propped up. I am not too hot because I am in the shade of a big tree, and I have got a mug of fragrant chai which I have been drinking whilst watching the boats bob up and down the lake, sparkling in the sunshine.
Apart from the hundreds and hundreds of sweaty pink people who are also here, it is tranquil and contented and absolutely perfect.
Of course there are hundreds of people here. The combination of a bank holiday and a gentle heatwave has brought tourists here in buzzing, sticky swarms. They are absolutely everywhere. All of the car parks are full, the buses are full, and the shelves of all of the shops are empty.
I had half thought that they might all have buzzed off by now, which is the usual way of things, especially if it rains, but they are not going anywhere. Everybody is determined to extract the last possible squeezings from a sunny day in the Lakes.
I can’t even begin to imagine why they might be here. I can’t think of anything more horrible than queueing miserably on hot pavements, sticky with ice cream accidents, waiting for your inexperienced turn on a heavy rowing boat, with squeaking children and everybody’s dog panting like a weirdo on a phone call to a puzzled nun.
Actually, that isn’t true, I just put that to the test by trying to think of more horrible things, and came up with loads, like slipping and landing in cow dung or shutting your fingers in the car door or finding that you haven’t packed your parachute properly, but all the same being hot and greasy with sun-cream and cross with the children in a steaming bank holiday crowd is still pretty grim.
Rather to my surprise, the fells have been deserted. Oliver and I trotted over them with the dogs yesterday and this morning, and saw hardly another soul. They are all here, trekking intrepidly around the gift shops.
It was very hot. The young Galloways have stopped charging about trying to bump their heads against each other, and were wallowing in the tarn this morning, occasionally splashing one another, like teenagers practising smoking on a canal bank. I took a picture to send to Mark, and have added it here, so that you can also enjoy the Lake District in the sunshine, albeit a step or two removed.
Oliver, incidentally, has got fed up of my elderly-person ambling around the fells, and has taken to bounding off ahead of me and reaching the summits first. Once there he does press-ups until I arrive. He managed sixty this morning, between all three hill tops.
I would never get into the Paras.
I have been putting some extra working hours in over the weekend, dashing out to work in the middle of the afternoon instead of waiting until evening, when everything has gone quiet. This has both helped my ruthless profiteering and also reminded me exactly why I don’t usually do it. I do not know how I have managed not to squish any milling tourists, all of whom have been spilling off the overcrowded pavements and meandering about in the road like a herd of overheated Galloways.
There really are a very lot of them.
It has, however, meant that I have not had a great deal of time for very much else. In between laundry, and dog-emptying, and mopping up Guffy’s misfortunes, there haven’t been any left-over unforgiving minutes, and then this morning Lucy and Jack arrived.
I knew that this was about to happen, because she had sent me a cheery text last night, although somehow I had hardly started on the day, and was just sweeping a carpet of leaves, dragged in and murdered by Guffy, off the conservatory floor, when they burst in through the back gate.
Roger Poopy was so astonished and thrilled that I thought he might pass out. Lucy is his favourite person in the whole world, he has never quite forgiven Jack for wickedly usurping his place in her bed. He hurled himself at her, barking and dribbling, and then collapsed on her knee, making loving little whining noises occasionally, whilst we all had a cup of tea and they waited for Lucy’s friend Emily to arrive.
They did not hang around for very long. They all went off in Jack’s open-topped sports car to spend the afternoon swimming in High Dam, and stopped by the taxi rank on their way home to tell me what a happy time they had had.
Oliver had gone with them, and they even took the dogs.
It has been a day for swimming.
