When we looked at the weather forecast this morning it informed us that there was 100% chance of rain for the entire day, and this turned out to be entirely correct.
At least it has turned out to be correct so far. Obviously the day is not yet over and we might still be surprised, although now that it is dark it is too late to be of any use for the washing.
You will not be surprised to learn that once again, the Lake District is not bursting with people who thought they might bring a tent and come up for a picnic and a swim.
Instead there are a handful of dreary cross-looking people, hunched under umbrellas and glancing up occasionally to see if anything interesting to do might just present itself.
Obviously nothing does, and they will all retreat into the pubs in the end, where they will drink too much because a warm, bright pub is better than a silent room in a guest-house, and then they will probably need to be taken home in a taxi.
They will have a headache tomorrow and the weather forecast is for more rain.
I am glad I am not here on my holidays.
We are taking the opportunity to have a peaceful evening on the taxi rank, undisturbed by anybody wanting to go anywhere very much. Mark is reading my book about Indian gangsters, and I am reading the very first of the books I will need to read for my course.
I am very excited about this.
It arrived yesterday morning, and I have been saving it up, whilst occasionally smoothing the cover and weighing it in my hands, ever since.
It is making me very happy.
There are a very lot of course books. I thought at first that I might get all of them on the Kindle, which is easy to carry about and doesn’t take very much dusting, at least not compared to the rows and rows of bookshelves under which every available wall-space in the house is currently groaning. However, some investigation led me to the surprising discovery that in fact it would be quite considerably cheaper just to buy them from second-hand sellers on Amazon.
I do not much approve of doing this, since the poor person who actually wrote the book does not make any money out of it, but sometimes life is just unfair and they will just have to drive a taxi in their spare time. In any case several of them are already dead and so probably won’t mind any more.
In any case that was what I did, and little parcels have been arriving through the letterbox at intervals ever since.
I can hardly describe the guilty joy of this feeling. Of course they are a complete self-indulgence, contributing absolutely nothing whatsoever to the smooth running and prosperity of the household. They are a selfish luxury, and I have been doing penance by trying not to eat anything expensive ever since.
This last was brought to a halt when Mark found out about it today, and we went to Sainsbury’s where he bought raspberries and chocolate, sweet peppers and some slices of vegetarian ham. I am not a vegetarian but since I have become elderly, the sort of ham made from dead pigs always seems laden with pig-grease, and I do not like it very much.
I never liked it very much anyway, perhaps I have just got better at saying so.
Anyway, all of that cost us a fortune, so I have become a true drain on the household economy.
Mark said that he will build another bookshelf for the university books.
I am going to go away and read the first one. I have been saving it for quite long enough.
