A very happy New Year to you all.
Number Two Daughter telephoned from Canada to express that sentiment this afternoon. She also made the depressing observation that the only members of the entire family who had gone out to have a celebratory decade-welcoming party were my eighty-year-old parents. We were working, obviously, and both Numbers One and Two Daughters had separately gone to bed early with mugs of herbal tea.
How astonished their teenage selves would have been.
Lucy and Oliver joined us for the fireworks at midnight. We always do this. I like fireworks very much, some of my very favourite evenings out have involved various explosive spectacular events, and these were as splendid as anybody could hope for, with whistles and bangs and extravagant showers of silver and gold sparkles. We cheered and clapped, and felt that the New Year had properly arrived.
It might be the last time we do this together. Of course once Lucy is properly marching up and down a police beat, brandishing her truncheon and keeping a stern eye open for malefactors, she is likely to be busy working at New Year. Certainly all of our police were out in force, with riot vans and dog vans, but they didn’t seem to be called upon very much. I saw one fight, and Mark saw one, but Windermere was otherwise peaceful for the start of the decade.
Apart from watching the fireworks we were kept busy all night. It does not matter about shirking off during the fireworks, because nobody ever wants to go anywhere at the New Year moment itself, but once they were finally extinguished and only the wreaths of smoke remained, everybody who was not planning a decadent night of new-decade-intoxication needed to go home to bed, and from that moment on we did not stop.
We worked until early morning, which was when the last revellers staggered drunkenly home, and celebrated with a small sherry at our kitchen table, because we are not much more exciting than Numbers One and Two Daughters.
We spent today bashing our lives back into order. Mark cleaned everybody’s shoes and I ironed things. We considered our plans for the incoming decade.
I was of the opinion that my resolution should be that I simply should not trust the BBC any more.
Not only are their plot lines in The Archers increasingly rubbish these days, but last night I caught them out in a blatant fib.
They promised that the New Year would be dry but a bit cloudy, and it wasn’t. It rained. It rained a lot. We were trying to hurtle around as fast as we could in order to maximise the number of double-time customers we could possibly collect, and we were ploughing through thick fog and tiresome, persistent rain.
The BBC said that it would be dry in Cumbria, and they made it up.
The weather forecast in question gave an irritatingly detailed description of all possible weather minutiae in the South West, because of the London fireworks, and then, as a bit of an afterthought, the hasty mention that it would probably be a bit cloudy if you were north of Watford.
It rained and rained.
I have reached the conclusion that I can not reasonably trust them if they are going to come up with any old under-researched garbage and present it as fact. If Boris Johnson takes their licence fee away from them then they will jolly well deserve it, that will teach them to think about what they are saying.
As for the plot lines in The Archers, we will not even begin to go there. I do not bother listening to it any more. It is full of cliff-hanging dramas and tiresome modern Issues. Nobody cares any more about the price of feed or who is making square bales or whether it is time to mulch your blackcurrants. I liked to hear these things. They were important. Instead it is entirely composed of ridiculous improbable drivel and I do not like it any more.
My New Year’s Resolutions need to include a rethink of my sources of information.
I understand you can get quite good results if you hang a bit of seaweed in your porch.
The picture is us at the fireworks, which were going off all around us. Mark took the picture. You can see his shadow on my back.
