It is summer today.
This is brilliant.
It has been really, truly brilliant, warm and dry and still, and the Lake District is full of people on their holidays.
I am on the taxi rank, watching them milling about pinkly. This is going to be a disjointed sort of entry, because I have hardly written anything yet and already I have been interrupted three times.
…and a fourth.
It was so warm that today I peeled my clothes off and sat in the garden.
I think that I am still short of Vitamin D. We have had so little sunshine this year that I am surprised the whole of Windermere has not got rickets, and when I went to the dentist she said that I ought to take a supplement, which I didn’t.
Today, however, I have compensated for this deficiency.
It is not entirely surprising that I am not getting enough sunshine, because my general dress habits would not shame an Amish goodwife. This is partly because I am of a modest and retiring nature and would not wish to expose my substantial curves to the public eye, but mostly because it is always so cold here.
Today, whilst the sun was at its height, I peeled off not only my jersey, but after a while, my shirt as well, and sat in the garden trying to get my shoulders to go brown, which they didn’t. They didn’t even go pink.
I would like to have brown shoulders because of the summer ball in a few weeks. I would very much prefer this to be authentic brown, the sort that you grow for yourself, not the spray-on sort which frequently turns out to be disconcertingly orange. I spend my entire working life looking at people who have made themselves look as beautiful as they possibly can for a wonderful holiday in the Lake District. I do not know why so many people think that it is a good idea to choose a skin tone which would match an armchair upholstered in the nineteen seventies, but it is an error of judgement that I am determined not to make.
Also you do not get Vitamin D out of a spray can.
Also sunshine is free.
Anyway, this established, Mark put a sheet of cardboard and an old duvet cover over the path, because we are not in the habit of sunbathing and some improvisation was called for, and I stretched out to fry my shoulders.
He faffed about next to me, doing something conservatory related, although I do not exactly know what because of having my eyes shut.
He has, as perhaps you can see from the picture, managed to break up all of the concrete, old and new, after which he discovered that the underneath layer of concrete was not an original part of the house after all, because underneath it lay some enormous slate flagstones leading to a long-buried sandstone step.
Those were original.
He levered them up, and found, finally, soil.
Underneath the step there was a square recess cut into the stone. You can see this in the picture. Mark said this was because the stone had been recycled into being a doorstep for our back door, after a previous life as something else, and he thought that it had probably been part of a window.
The stone had split right down the middle and broken, but probably we will re-use it anyway. It is a big stone.
It will make a handy step for the indoor banana plantation.
I like to think of when it might first have been cut, years and years even before our house was built, and then prudently re-used, just as we are going to re-use it now. Long dead stonemasons cut that, when they were alive and busy, and complaining about the weather.
Eventually we had to abandon the garden. Not only did we have to get ready for work, but tomorrow is Oliver’s shooting competition, and we have got to take a picnic.
Usually I am quite creative with picnics, but I am not feeling very domestic at the moment, so we went to Sainsbury’s and bought lots of different kinds of doughnuts. We will have doughnuts and bacon sandwiches, cooked in the camper van.
Lucy was not around to be helpful today.
She had gone on a date.
She went to meet a chap in Manchester, and they went to a bar run by some youthful friends of mine. They used to work at an hotel up here, and they have started a business of their own. They are not much older than Lucy and it is all very modern and happening. It is called Blank Canvas, if you happen to be passing the Printworks in Manchester.
She did not get back until long after ten at night, having been out all day. She had had such a lovely day that it had left her with a headache. This happens to me if I get too excited about anything, especially when the sun is shining.
I am going to stop writing. I have written frantically every time I have had a minute, but still it is long after midnight, and I have not finished.
We have been madly, lucratively busy. We will be able to pay for the jacket and the overdraft and even the shopping.
It is so lovely to have summer.
