It was a hot run this morning.
I was early, because Mark went off to work, but even so the sun was high in the sky, and I got very uncomfortably sticky, leaking salt beads from every pore.
It was good to be out in the bright morning. The birds piped and called to one another, and insects buzzed like the string section of an orchestra, filling the air with sound. As I got closer to the village we were joined by the huge deafening percussion of a train, with a shriek of a whistle to top it off.
It is beyond magnificent to have trains again, except that they are not real trains, run by the train company. They are some spare ones, lent by West Coast Lines from their museum, and they look like something out of Brief Encounter. This is because that is exactly what they are, since it was filmed in the station at Carnforth, a couple of stops along the track.
Our twerp of an MP has, for once, managed to deserve his salary and excessive expense account. He has persuaded West Coast Lines to lend us some emergency trains and run a service, of sorts, along our line, so you can now get in and out of Windermere again. The carriages are red, with clunky handles on the doors, but they run, and everybody is so pleased that the MP has asked the Transport Secretary if we can keep them, and dispense with the stupid tiresome railway company that finds it too difficult to run trains in and out of the Lake District during the holiday season.
Anyway, we have trains again, a haphazard timetable, but a definite tribute to our MP’s terror of being voted out of office, and things have settled down a bit.
This means that there is once again some point in being at work, there are people milling about who want to get in taxis. We are working most of the weekend, but school summer shenanigans are striking again on Sunday, and we have got to leg off first to Oliver’s school, and then to Lucy’s.
Lucy’s school is easy enough, all we have got to do is return Lucy, who has still got a couple of weeks to go.
Oliver’s school is a bit more complicated than that.
We had an email from him last week explaining that he has signed himself up to the Fathers and Sons Clay Pigeon Shooting Competition this Sunday, and by obvious extrapolation, we thought that Mark had better go as well.
Mark says that he has not shot a clay pigeon for about twenty years.
The problem with sending your children to lovely civilised schools is that all of the other parents go off on their country estates at weekends and go hunting and shooting there.
I do not think that anybody else is too busy driving a taxi to practise their aim.
It will be the sort of event where you might take a Barbour jacket and hip flask and flat cap, unless the sun is shining, in which case you will just need the hip flask.
Mark is a good shot, and so is Oliver, and so it will probably be absolutely fine, if a bit unexpected. I hope so, because the family honour is resting on their shoulders, we do not want everybody to think that we are dreadful oiks. Also he has got a perfectly adequate hip flask, it is packed in the camper van already.
Number Two Daughter and Mrs. Number Two Daughter thought that they would like to come as well, and of course we will still have Lucy with us. You take a picnic, and congregate together on the school lawn, and so I have spent much of today marinading bits of chicken and baking some more buns. We are going to go in the camper van.
It is going to be very exciting.
Have a picture of Lucy, for no other reason than that I have just found it on my computer and liked it.
