I am on the taxi rank, and I am wet and weary.
It is raining, and there is nobody here.
It is still raining a very great deal. I would not be here either even if I were on my holidays and had nothing to do other than eat dinner and drink wine. I would be indoors, in a place without streams running over my feet, and I would stay there.
Bowness is silent and dark.
I have had a surprisingly busy day whilst we had daylight.
It all started off quite slowly, in a quiet and unassuming sort of way. I was expecting the lodger to come for a cup of coffee, and wondered, absently, whether I would have time to clean the bathroom before she came.
In the end I did not clean the bathroom. I do not like cleaning the bathroom anyway, but it turned out that I did not really have time. I made mayonnaise, because we had run out, and hung the newly-washed sheets up, since it is Monday, to steam all the windows up in the house.
I was just starting to make biscuits when Mark rang. He had been dispatched to work with instructions to call in at the upholstery stall on the market on his way, and pick up some fabric to cover the lid of some lovely drawers in the new living room. We are going to make them into a bench.
He rang up and said that the man did not have any of the right fabric. He said that he was closing down and selling everything for a pound for every metre.
Upholstery fabric usually costs me between ten and fifteen pounds for a metre.
I was both utterly horrified to discover that we are going to lose the fabric stall, and very pleased indeed to be able to buy splendid bargain curtain fabric.
I do not want to make any curtains at the moment, but you never know.
Mark went along the stall with the camera bit of his telephone and showed me blurry pictures of fabric. He is not very expert at cinematography, and it was a bit difficult to work out what they all were.
We bought fifty metres anyway.
I can give everybody curtains for Christmas.
I had just started making biscuits again, when the lodger arrived, so I stopped, happily, and made coffee.
The lodger has had an accident, and her arm is in a sling, so I made sympathetic noises and gave helpful medical advice on the basis of no medical knowledge whatsoever.
I had just made the coffee and was considering carrying on with the biscuits anyway, when the phone rang, and it was the Peppers.
Their next door neighbour was busily knocking his house down and had lots of firewood. They had very helpfully asked him if I could have it.
I have not discussed it on these pages but in fact I have been very worried about firewood. Most of our wood is in a huge stack at the farm and needs to be split. Until it has been split it will not dry properly. Until it has dried properly it will be rubbish to burn. Wet wood is no good at all. It smokes and spits and does not get very hot, and then it goes out. After that your house gets cold and the washing does not dry.
We have been worrying about firewood. I brought the very last of the cut and dry firewood into the house a couple of days ago and it was almost at its end.
Mark had brought home all of the torn-out floorboards from the house in Barrow, but that was almost completely gone, and we had got up this morning to a handful of sticks and a couple of the driest logs, which were not very dry.
He had said this morning that he would try and sort some out somehow.
The Peppers’ phone call was like a gift from the Gods.
The lodger and I rushed round there, and the neighbour said that he would fill up his truck and then leave it at the back of our house, which he did.
The lodger offered to help, which I declined.
There is a limit to the usefulness of a person with only one functional hand when it comes to hauling logs.
I left her by the fire and went out to see the truck.
It was piled high with roof timbers.
As I clambered over the tailgate it started to rain.
I got soaked.
I dragged the wood off the truck and made a stack in the yard. We filled the fireplace with lots of bone-dry offcuts, and dumped a few more bits in the conservatory for tomorrow.
By the time I had finished I was filthy, and wet to the skin, and bleeding from scraped knuckles and splinters, but we had a huge pile of firewood.
It had not got very wet. I tugged and pulled and shunted, and eventually managed to cover it all with a sheet of board, so that it would stay dry.
I could not have been more pleased. There is firewood for weeks and weeks. Well some weeks anyway.
The lodger made me a cup of tea.
Obviously I was late for work.
