Heat

We have had a gloriously hot day, followed, very late at night, by a burst of heavy rain. This has not cooled things down, but has left the night hot, and damp, and heavy with the honey-scent of pollen. This has been drifting through the window of the taxi whilst  have been driving, and is splendid. I have been breathing hard, in big blissful gulps, making my passengers look doubtfully at me over the back seat.

I like the heat.

This has been a very fortunate attribute today, although obviously considerably less fortunate for virtually all of the rest of the year, here in the Lake District.

I have spent today, however, sweltering comfortably in what we were unreliably told, because it was by the BBC, was the hottest day of the year.

I was very glad I was not in London.

I have just had some Londoners in the taxi who assured me that despite the baking heat and melting pavements, Londoners are still wearing face masks, even outdoors.

They must be boiling, like the suet puddings you used to have to wrap in a piece of muslin before chucking them in the pot over the fire.

There were no outdoor mask-wearers here, or so few that I was still tempted to stare at them when I saw them going past.

In any case, they were probably refugee Londoners, the ones who have not headed to Brighton, where they are making the council cluck crossly about not sitting next to one another on the beaches.

Nobody seemed to mind sitting next to one another on the beaches here. There were hundreds of people milling about Bowness, looking at the ducks and feeding their children on sticky cones of Windermere Ice Cream, Twenty  Exciting Flavours, and in the end it turned out to be a busy sort of night.

I took four rascally grandfathers out to Kendal, whilst they reminisced about the noisy awfulness of their own children’s babyhood, and the happiness of having grandchildren, whose various squeaks and leaks were other people’s problem.

An old chap in the disabled space next to me stopped to tell me that it was his first night out since the whole virus thing started, and that even though he was ninety, and had heart problems, he had come to the realisation that it was better to be dead than in prison. Hence he had decided that he was going to go off out and enjoy his life, and to hell with the Government.

I concurred heartily with this sentiment, and wished him well.

I am none too impressed with the Government myself tonight, since  I am feeling very sad on behalf of all the poor people in Manchester who were going to have lovely family celebrations for Eid, and now they can’t.

It is as if somebody waited until Christmas Eve and then cancelled Christmas.

Also the poor people whose weddings are going to be cancelled. Even if they have the wedding and don’t let anybody come, they have still got to sanitise each other before they are allowed to hand over any rings, and for some completely inexplicable reason, are not allowed to kiss one another. Admittedly it would be difficult because they have to wear masks, but what on earth does the Government think they have been doing in the six months leading up to the ceremony?

Surely they don’t believe that everybody has been smiling chastely at one another across a socially distanced room.

If anybody ought to be able to work that one out, Boris Johnson should.

I do not know enough about it to really know if it was necessary to tell Manchester and half of Yorkshire that they were not allowed to have friends any more, but I jolly well hope it absolutely was, what a ghastly thing to do if you are not at least three hundred percent sure.

You ought to believe that it will stop everybody from dying until they are at least a hundred years old, and also make them phenomenally wealthy and successful and magically lose two and a half stones in weight each, before you spoil people’s happy times like that.

I could do with losing two and a half stones in weight. I have eaten too much black currant cheesecake this evening, and am feeling portly. If only I could eat what I liked and still get thin, how splendid that would be.

This job does not help. It is almost one in the morning, and I have been in this taxi since three o’clock. This has been lucrative but could hardly be considered to be exercise.

I am tired.

I am going to read my book for the last hour before it turns into bedtime.

Goodnight.

Have a picture of the family shopping trip to Sainsbury’s.