Life Improvement

It is raining again.

The sunshine that has been so magnificently bathing the south of the country appears to have become bored before it finished the journey this far north, and today it has been grey and drizzly.

I was cross about this, because I wanted to paint the wall outside the kitchen window as part of my Life Improvement project, and I couldn’t, because it was wet and cold.

I put a jersey on and went to the ironmonger’s where I bought some paint anyway.

Mark took the camper van for its MOT sequel. You will be pleased to hear that it passed, perhaps our fortunes are changing.

After this Mark and I had a long discussion about being That Certain Age and doing Life Improving things. He was not working today, and it was too wet to do very much in the garden, and so it seemed a good opportunity to consider our activities and see if anything could be made better.

We agreed that he would take over running the bank account. Usually I do this, because of being at home where the wi-fi lives, and I can just spend money at the click of a magical button.

The thing is that these days Mark is not working on some obscure oil rig somewhere, or in some scruffy rural garage, or even in his shed at the farm. He is working to install rural broadband and therefore has got wi-fi all the time, and if he does not have it then he installs some. I am not sure quite how he does this, perhaps he commands it with some magical words: but however it happens, he summons wi-fi and therefore can use the Barclays Mobile Phone App just as well as I can.

I am not in the least sorry to be deprived of this particular chore. There is a lot of remembering and worrying to be done, especially in the winter.

We made large quantities of tea and opened our computers.

It is so easy to give money to people in these modern days.

Mark scanned down the list of current payees. He enquired about one or two of the more mysterious ones, and wondered why we had made so many payments to Amazon lately, and then said that perhaps it was all for the best that it is not going to be my problem any more.

We had got some money in the account, because of lots of people wanting rural broadband at the moment. Mark paid school fees and cleared his credit card and paid the council tax.

We are not even broke again, because he left some cash in the account to cover emergencies. I never do that. I always think that I will try not to spend anything, which usually goes very wrong quite quickly.

He thinks that he might go away tomorrow.

His friend Ted is doing something very exciting indeed.

He is in Scotland, taking the newly rebuilt Bluebird out for its very first trip for fifty years, and Mark is longing to go and see it all.

You might know that Donald Campbell misfortunately crashed Bluebird on Coniston fifty years ago, whilst trying to be the fastest person to get from one end of the lake to the other in a boat.

Something terrible happened and poor Donald Campbell was killed. He is buried in Coniston churchyard.

When Lucy was a baby we lived in Coniston, and everybody assembled in the streets to see the Bluebird brought back after she had finally been recovered.

Some people have painstakingly knitted her back together, and now she is as good as new and ready for somebody else to go speeding up and down lakes in her, and the person who has been asked to do this is Mark’s friend Ted.

I think that this is because he is a brilliant hydroplane driver, not because he is a bit mental.

They are trying it all out in Scotland this week, working out how to get her on and off the water, and fuelled up and generally functioning properly, and Ted has got his picture in all of the newspapers.

I know that Mark has been longing to go and look at Bluebird because she has got a very interesting engine, and also he likes doing things with Ted, who also thinks that fast engines are important.

It would be very good for his own Life Improvement.

He is going to take the camper and buzz off for a few days tomorrow.

I am secretly a bit pleased about this. It means that I can eat peanut butter sandwiches for every single meal, and read in bed.

Quite possibly at the same time.