Damp

Today did not start off very well.

I had got out of bed to open the curtains when I trod on a bumble bee that had picked our bedroom carpet as a cosy place for a little snooze.

I do not know which of us was more upset, me or the bee. It did not leave the sting in my foot, which suggests that it did not inadvertently die from the mishap, and it buzzed off in high dudgeon through the open window, leaving me hopping around the bedroom saying rude words and upsetting the dogs.

I smothered it in cream and took a Piriton and felt very sorry for myself, but it was not too bad really, and I was mostly recovered by the time Mark and Oliver had buzzed off to work.

It was Lucy’s last day at home, and we were all feeling a bit sad anyway. We took the photograph before they left. Lucy had taken to wearing one of my dresses, not for reasons of sartorial elegance, but because they are cool and light, and splendid for hot days. Oliver was wearing one of Mark’s flat caps, because he likes them. They keep the sun and rain off his head and they are comfortable.

We looked across at them and realised that they had turned into us.

It was always going to happen.

Lucy and I faffed about clearing the kitchen up and cooking things after that. We made a start on the ginger beer manufacturing project, but there is a point when you have boiled the water and sugar and have to wait until it cools, and it didn’t. Eventually we got fed up of waiting for it and left it on the back of the cooker for another day. I came back to it this evening and it was still warm.

We had thought that it was so very hot we might go off for another swim in the evening, so I pegged the washing out on the line and went off to work just after lunchtime, because too much shirking is not good either for the soul or the wallet. Lucy went to bed, because she was going to drive back to Northampton overnight, when it was cool, and there were no queues of traffic puffing hot exhaust fumes for miles and miles of motorway.

I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting hotly on the taxi rank, sewing labels into Oliver’s new uniform. That is to say, I did not seem to get much sewing done. I spent a lot of time hunting around my knees for things. I lost the scissors, and then I lost the needle, and then I lost my glasses, and then I couldn’t find the scissors again. Eventually I gave up and stuffed it all back into the bag and drank tea instead.

I had just done a run down to the bottom of the lake, and on my return found myself blocked into the middle of the taxi rank, when the skies overhead darkened.

I looked upwards anxiously and wondered if I ought to rush home and bring the washing in. It was all of our swimming towels from yesterday, and it had been very nearly dry when I left, ages ago.

It was an academic point anyway because I was stuck in the middle of the taxi rank with taxis all round me.

I rang Lucy just as the first enormous raindrops splashed on to the windscreen.

She was half asleep and did not really understand what I was talking about, but agreed that she would, probably, go and have a look at the washing.

I hoped desperately that it was a localised shower and would not reach Windermere.

Within half a minute the rain was sluicing down as if God had sliced a huge gash in the bottom of his swimming pool.

I put the windscreen wipers on to look, but it was raining so hard that it didn’t make any difference.

Eventually somebody jumped in the taxi in front of me and I started the engine and hurtled off, splashing along what suddenly seemed to be a river bed on my way back home.

Lucy and the washing were both drenched.

I was drenched as well by then, because I noticed on the way home that the skylight on the camper van was still open, and had to dash into the house for the keys and back to the car, and then into the camper van and out again.

Those twenty steps left me soaked to the skin.

Lucy and I thought we would not go swimming after all.

It was a localised shower, it had not even got as far as the end of the lake, and it left the air feeling fresh and cool.  We strolled around the park in the evening, for Lucy’s farewell walk with the dogs, and looked at the sunset, and the world seemed to be steaming.

She left after that, much to our sadness. She has gone off back to Northampton to carry on arresting nuisances and consoling the distressed. She demonstrated some police brutality on Oliver before she left, she was very good at it, and hardly left any marks at all.

It will be ages before we see her again, but it has been such a happy few days.

It is so easy to be cheerful in the sunshine. This is wonderful.

What a brilliant life this is.