We are home.
We are woodsmoky, and peeling slightly from the wind and sun, and we think we might have an early night.
We need an early night, not only because we are full of fresh air and sleepiness, but also because we are going to do worky things tomorrow. Mark is going to go back to Barrow and I am going to tidy up and then go and waste my afternoon on the taxi rank.
I do not mind any more. I have had the loveliest time.
The Peppers camper van chugged through the gate as I wrote the very last words last night.
The dogs belted around, hurling themselves on top of one another and barking, and we pulled our old camp chairs up to the fire.
We have got a little fire pit made out of the middle of an old Land Rover wheel, on to which Mark has welded some legs and a little windbreak at the back. The wood was dry, and burned bright and hot, and we stretched out our legs and drank wine, and ate woodsmoke-flavoured lamb and rice. We cooked this on another fire, this one made out of oak chips so that the smoke would taste nice as well.
I liked it very much, although I was less enthusiastic about scraping the thoroughly-encrusted black layer of burnt, off the tajine this morning. This was not as tiresome as it might have been, because when we had finished last night, we left the burned tajine on the ground, and Pepper gnawed at it until a surprising amount of still possibly slightly lamb-flavoured-black had disappeared.
Charcoal is a jolly good antidote to wind. Every cloud has a silver lining.
It was splendid. Mark piled blackthorn and oak and cherry on to the fire, and we sat in the darkening evening watching the flames and drinking wine, until in the end the stars came out, and my eyes started to close even despite my best efforts.
The Peppers stayed a little longer around the fire, but I couldn’t. We showered the worst of the smoke-black away and collapsed into bed.
It was cool this morning, with a little gusty wind that whirled around us and flapped my still un-trimmed hair into my eyes. We thought, guiltily, that we ought to go home and do some of the urgent things that needed doing there, but we didn’t. We stayed joyfully outdoors, in the sunshine, and the wind, where we cooked more lamb and rice and oak-smoke, and Mark dug a ring of holes and knocked the fence posts in, so that we can have a fence to keep the tiresome sheep out.
He did not knock the fence posts in with a mallet. He is thoroughly modern and advanced. He drove his digger up to every post and bashed the posts in with the bucket. This worked brilliantly and saved wear and tear on his shoulder muscles.
I dug out my paints, and passed the happiest of happy afternoons repainting the pictures on the camper van. Some of them have faded terribly, and some of the paint has flaked off a few altogether.
I did not do very many, because it is a huge, huge thing, and regular readers will remember that it took me the whole of one summer to paint it, years ago. I painted some of the things that have suffered the worst damage and been upsetting me the very most.
The poor octopus has been getting a bit bashed, and I re-did the bell, the book and the candle. These are spread over the front of the van, and were originally painted over a few days when I was feeling quite enthusiastically pretentious, not that I am in the least now, of course.
The bell, the book and the candle, for those who don’t know, which I imagine is almost everybody, are the instruments of excommunication, although the I think in the original usage, the book is not being written by a gun-toting octopus. Anyway, I painted them so that I could cherish secret superiority feelings about nobody but me spotting such a cleverly arcane allusion.
Obviously nobody ever did, and I had forgotten about it until today when I thought: I wonder why I painted this candle here, and then remembered. It was because I am an idiot.
It was brilliant to see the colours beginning to be bright and fresh again, and I think I am about as glad as it is possible for a person to feel. We rumbled slowly home, with another small cloud of black smoke following us.
I discovered that it was a good job I have not been excommunicated and the Gods are speaking to me, because I had left my car parked in the camper van space in the middle of the village, with the door unlocked and the keys in the ignition.
Fortunately nobody wants it.
Mark took the picture at the farm the other day. It is a picture of some things that are going to be a massive nuisance and we might need a bigger fence.
