I don’t suppose that you need me to tell you that we are having the most beautiful Maytime imaginable.
I took the dogs on their morning ramble this morning, up through the woods and through the bluebells, and it was the sort of perfect day that people sing about when they are twenty and in love and have the sort of magical picnic which includes champagne and strawberries and does not attract wasps.
I am in my fifties and was by myself, and in any case had just had my breakfast, but a little of the summery magic was there all the same. There were larks singing and lambs leaping and wild cherries and hawthorn blossom, and above all it was warm. I took my jersey off and once we got home I divested myself of my vest as well: two clouts at once and May is still not out.
I was by myself because Mark is still working in Barrow. He has taken the drill-round-corners and gone off to make our fortunes. This is not as difficult as it once was because the Chancellor has given us some cash as well, and it looks as though we will not be evicted for being impecunious after all. This is a massive relief. I like our house and do not wish to be chucked on to the street, there would be nobody to water the tomatoes.
It is a good thing to have a day in which the sun is shining and one’s money worries have temporarily evaporated.
I meant to do all sorts of wonderful things with it but in the end I didn’t. I made some peach flavoured ice cream for dinner, and painted the boot rack. This was a tiresome job because it had been made out of slabs of discarded board which had all sorts of horrid glue residues sticking to them. I scraped these off, virtuously, so that I could feel like the sort of person who does a painstakingly thorough good job, but I am not really one of those and the end result was a bit lumpy and slapdash.
I do not care about this because it will in any case be under the boots, and nobody is ever likely to come around and either admire or criticise the boot rack. I have painted it because things do not look lovely when they are made of left over bits, especially if some are purple and others green, and all of them have dollops of dead brown glue on them.
It is now a civilised shade of creamy lemon, and looks considerably improved.
It had not dried by the time Mark came home and so the boots are still all over the place, because I could not be bothered to start putting them away after that. There is no hurry, I suppose. We will still be in lockdown tomorrow.
Lucy rang this evening. She is enjoying being a policeman immensely, although has become bored with being asked to invigilate in other people’s domestic disputes. She has attended so many locked-down squabbles this week that she was contemplating asking for a transfer to Traffic, just for a rest.
She seems to be managing very nicely indeed. She has baked some lemon cakes and repotted her pot plants during her summery days off, and has put in an application for an allotment.
It is lovely when one’s children become interested in truly interesting things.
The picture is our own interesting thing. You will perhaps notice that the pumpkin has begun to make its way slowly along the roof support. It has pumpkin flowers on that bit, it will give dinners an interesting Damocles sensation. The yellow flower in the bottom is not a pumpkin but a courgette, and the round green things in the foreground are the satsumas.
I am feeling very pleased with it all.
The peach ice cream was splendid.
