Obviously we went back to work tonight, because it is Friday and we need the cash.
When we woke up this morning, though, we were on the beach in Ulverston, and the sun was shining.
The tide was a long, long way out, and the rivers that normally gush into the bay had slowed to almost a trickle, and the bay was sandy for miles. The sea seemed to have disappeared into another dimension, shimmering in the far distance. We could have walked across the bay certainly as far as Heysham, and quite possibly as far as Blackpool, which we could see last night when we had our last walk before we went to bed. The Tower was lit up in the distance, changing colours occasionally, reminding us of happy times.
We did not walk across the bay, partly because we did not want to be in Heysham, and partly because of disturbing events concerning Chinese cocklers on these very sands. There are quicksands in Morecambe Bay, and every now and again somebody glugs to a horrible death and disappears for ever, which might, it has been suggested, be what once happened to the vanished Legion Of The Ninth, back in the time of the Roman occupation.
Either way, we did not walk across the bay. We strolled, gently, on the flat, dry sands for hours, warm in the sunshine, and felt wonderfully contented.
We talked and talked. We have not had very much time together at all lately, and we have missed one another.
We needed to think about our current state of being Burnt Out, and about what we are going to do about it. There is no point in realising that something is making you feel tired and cross and then just carrying on doing it anyway. You have got to change things, and do something else, or you will be unhappy, which is then entirely your own fault.
We did not quite know what it was that we should be doing instead. Mark likes installing rural broadband, and does not want to stop. I do not want him to stop either, because he is learning new and interesting things, which he always enjoys.
The problem is that we are just getting very tired. Mark confessed that he fell asleep on the top of a radio tower this week, swinging in his climbing harness, whilst he was waiting for a configuration to come through on the phone. This is not brilliant engineering behaviour.
We decided, on reflection, that we could not think of anything sensible to change whilst we were too tired to be able to count to twenty, even in our flip-flops. We thought that today we would just enjoy the sunshine and walk, and that we would come back next week and think a bit more.
We walked for miles, hand in hand, ambling happily across the hot, dry sand, and listening to the seabirds, until we had walked off our breakfast, and it was time for a lunchtime glass of wine, accompanied by hot, buttery bread rolls and creamy blue cheese, and followed by a little snooze.
Mark had attached his newly-repaired solar panel to the batteries whilst we went out, and was pleased to discover that it had done a splendid job of charging everything up. I touched up some of the paintwork where it had chipped a bit, which looked fine, except when I had finished I sprayed it with what I thought was lacquer, but which turned out to be carpet glue when I looked. It is in the same colour of tin.
I have no idea what result this will have, it looked perfectly all right, but perhaps I had better put some lacquer over the top of it some time soon.
I did not mention this to Mark.
It is fine to have little secrets about some things, even when you are a couple.
The picture below is Oliver, who has been occupying a bed in sick bay all day, due to his recent disability. We have not rushed over to see him, because we think that he is probably not in a state of emergency distress.
Matron sent the picture when she thought I might be worried about him.
