I am very pleased to tell you that you can continue to trust the government after all.
That is to say, I do not know if you trusted the government in the first place, my own feelings are a bit mixed on the subject, they are jolly good at some things, but there are others at which they are an absolute shambles and they should all be sitting in the naughty corner.
The particular subject about which I am pleased to be able to reassure you of the integrity of our beloved leaders is the weather.
The rain is coming down in sheets.
It is raining so hard that everybody in the Lake District has gone home, except me, because obviously I live here.
It does not look as if anybody else lives here at the moment.
Hence I am sitting, utterly and completely without the smallest hope of earning any money, on the taxi rank.
I am the only person here. There is not even any traffic.
It is so quiet that I have begun to wonder if there has been an apocalypse. I have not listened to the news for a day or two, and it could well be that we have a new and virulent strain of bat flu that causes an instant and agonising death, encouraging everybody of an anxious disposition to stay at home.
The only bright spot on the horizon is my new windscreen wipers. I keep switching them on, with a small burst of happiness every time. They do make the windscreen wonderfully transparent.
I have come out to work as a sort of last gasp of industry, because we have resolved to take tomorrow as a holiday.
This is an exciting thought.
We were contemplating the world last night, and I complained of feeling world-weary and fed up.
Mark thought he might be world-weary as well.
We considered this for a little while, and decided that we needed a holiday.
We thought that we would have one here, in our very own house.
We have never ever done this.
When we are not working, we are not on holiday. Usually we are dashing about doing all of the things that we have not got around to doing whilst we are at work. We never have a holiday in the Lake District.
We considered what a holiday might be like.
We thought that it should involve nice things to eat, interesting alcohol and reading books.
We hardly read books at all at home. I read for a little while in bed whilst Mark is having his shower, but otherwise books are saved for the taxi rank, or the camper van, or holidays. Mostly the taxi rank. We read a lot at work.
It dawned on us that we have spent ages and ages building our house into exactly the sort of wonderful place you would love to spend our holidays, and we never, ever do.
We were suddenly completely inspired by this thought. We thought that we would spend the whole day tomorrow doing nothing at all, except the things that we like doing. We will go for walks and loaf about in the conservatory and read books and eat olives and watch a film.
With this in mind, once Mark had buzzed off to work this morning, I set about making the house into a Holiday Cottage. This was not very difficult, there are lots of them on our street, and all I had to do was copy. Obviously it is not exactly like a holiday cottage, because nobody has pinched the dustbin and the parking space, but it is pretty close.
I tidied up and hoovered with our ace new hoover, which works brilliantly now that Mark has taken the Lego bricks out of the tube and has put it back together properly. It practically sucked the carpets off the floor.
He has fixed the old one as well, which works, although not half so efficiently. We have taken it upstairs to the top floor, so that when the children are home they can just help themselves to the hoover whenever they like without needing to worry about bothering me or trailing up and down several flights of stairs. I expect they will be delighted.
I cut some firewood and filled the log pile and watered the conservatory and left absolutely everywhere looking clean and fresh. I had a job cleaning in an hotel once, and so I know exactly how you make a bedroom look nice without going to too much trouble. I wiped the mirrors with the towels and the tooth mugs with the flannels and blew the dust away with the hairdryer.
I put a chicken in the oven for dinner, and peeled some vegetables.
I mixed sugar syrup and lemon juice for cocktails later.
I took the dogs for a quick empty and came out to work. I have left the fairy lights on and told Google to play Radio Three, quietly in the background.
We will come home to a holiday in the Lake District.
I am feeling quite refreshed already.
