We have returned.
We were not holding out any great hopes for our return. We had not watched television news, obviously, but a great number of people had called us to warn us that the Lake District had become a sort of modern-day Atlantis in our absence, due to non-stop torrential rain for the whole of the last week.
We did not think very much about this. The Lake District gurgles itself underneath the rising floodwaters fairly regularly at this time of year, once the leaves have fallen to block the drains, and sooner or later it usually resurfaces, like the pirate ship in the Disney film.
Hence when we left my cousin’s house this morning, we were not in any great rush, being of the opinion that we would give everywhere plenty of chance to dry out again before we tried to paddle our way back home.
It was raining a bit in Bath this morning, although not on the Lake District scale of things, and by the time we had had a last coffee with my cousin it had cleared. We were sorry to say goodbye.
My cousin produced a scrap book from a teenage holiday we had shared together, and I was absolutely captivated, not least because I recall suffering agonies at the time, due to being thoroughly convinced of my hideously rotund spottiness. The scrap book revealed no such scrofulous grotesque, and I was quite pleasantly surprised to discover that my teenage appearance had been entirely normal in every feature, what a waste of angst that had obviously been.
It was splendid to see so many memories, although somewhat unsettling to observe that our grandmother, clearly an ancient old lady in every picture, was only four years older than our present age. In my recollection she was so doddery as to be practically waiting at the graveside, and I considered this with some concern on the way home, since presumably this must be the way I appear to Ritalin Boy.
The journey passed without incident, and a very great deal of sunshine. We stopped in somewhere which might have been Gloucester, in order to empty the dogs and refill ourselves, but that was the only noticeable moment of the trip.
It takes a long time to travel from Bath to Windermere, but today, when traffic was crawling at the sort of pace employed by Roger Poopy when he is being hauled up the stairs for a bath, it took hours and hours. About ten hours, actually, and it was dark when we finally steamed into the back alley to unload.
Once unloaded we stuffed washing into the machine and rushed about getting ready for work.
The Lake District is nowhere near as wet as the weather forecast would have you believe. Indeed, it is not especially wet at all, with two significant puddles at either end of Windermere, one of which I got stuck in later on.
This was entirely my own fault because I hit it too fast. I should have been paying more attention, but wasn’t, and when I got to the middle of the puddle the taxi started coughing terribly, and only just made it out at the other side, whereupon it wheezed to a juddering halt.
My customers were not impressed.
I am indifferent to customers’ opinions, and told them that they could either wait for Mark or walk. They elected to wait, rather to my disappointment. It turned out that Mark was some time away and took twenty minutes to turn up, by which time I had drunk all of my flask of tea and become bored with listening to the customers’ going on about somebody called Bruce, who they assumed to be missing them, and who might either have been their dog or their son, I never managed to work out which.
Mark took the customers back to their hotel whilst I waited in the puddle. Unlike Bruce, I did not miss them once they had gone.
Once they had been disposed of, and charged all the same, he came back to rescue me.
I am an old hand at getting stuck in floods, and know not to try to start the engine. If you do this the water gets pushed up into the pistons and they explode. You have got to wait for your husband to turn up with a screwdriver, and take the air intake pipe off. Then you can start the engine, and the water all spits out in an massive steamy cloud, and after a smoky interlude whilst he puts the air intake pipe back, you can get going again.
This happens to my car with some regularity because the plastic bit that shields the air intake is not there any more, and nobody cares enough to replace it.
Mark emptied the air intake and we restarted the engine, which seemed to have suffered no ill-effects, and so we are back in business again.
We are feeling breezily positive. We are home, having travelled something in the region of two thousand miles in the last couple of weeks. Both taxis are working, the camper van is only not working a bit, and we are earning money again.
Things are looking good.
