Goodness, it is windy.
I don’t suppose you need me to tell you that, unless, of course, you are in California or somewhere similarly warm and lovely, where I jolly well wish I was. If you are sufficiently misfortunate to be on holiday in the Lake District then I imagine you have noticed the wind already, or at least, noticed the sudden striking mobility of all the dustbins and newly unexpected tendency for trees to drop on your head.
There were quite a few trees blown over last night. Several roads turned out to be blocked by them, which is a jolly nuisance at two in the morning when you are starting to think hopefully about going home, and I had to make several creative detours. My car is still not going properly, which was making the whole thing a bit of an adventure. It has got some kind of problem with the oil pressure, and has slowed to the pace of an Amazon shelf stacker with a flat battery.
This made last night somewhat scary. My general approach to driving in weather like this is to get my foot to the floor and get out from underneath overhanging trees as fast as possible, especially the excitingly creaky ones.
This is not wonderfully facilitated by a grumbling taxi with a top speed of about fifteen miles an hour.
It does go faster than that sometimes, only somehow not when I am trying to encourage it to hurtle away from the arboreal danger zones, with gritted teeth and my foot jammed down as hard as it will go.
Another new bit is going to arrive tomorrow, and Mark says that he will make it work again.
We are hoping that this bit will work, but of course there are a dozen complicated problems, all caused by the electronic bits refusing to co-operate with one another. As fast as one is fixed, another bit seems to throw up its hands and stump off to sulk in a corner.
We will get it sorted out in the end.
We had all sorts of plans for today. We have decided that one of our priorities, despite our current state of penury, ought to be to get the camper van fixed and back on the road. We got up this morning with our very souls shining with the enthusiastic intention of Mark going directly across to the shed and getting some working lights set up so that we could make a start next week.
We were still faffing about with laundry and dogs when the telephone rang, and it was one of the other taxi drivers.
All the trains had been cancelled, he said, and people were desperate for taxis. He had taken more bookings than he could manage, and all of the tourists were chugging along as if they all had a fault on their oil pressure, so would one of us please, please come out and help.
Mark went.
I stayed at home because of wanting to get the week’s cleaning done. Usually this should be done tomorrow, on Clean Sheets Day, but I hate doing it so much that I thought I would get it out of the way early, and then I could usefully occupy tomorrow by doing something much more exciting, like going to the shops.
I scrubbed and mopped and dusted and polished, and even remembered to change all of the clocks. This had been a surprise on waking up, when we discovered that it was not half past eleven after all, and there was no need to dash about and swear.
Mark called in for a cup of tea before we both went out to work for the evening. He had not made very much money, he said, because of the massive queues of cautious traffic. We are hoping that they will all have gone by tonight, and we can carry on with our usual operating procedure of thundering through massive puddles and screeching around fallen trees.
Well, Mark can.
I will still be going slowly.
