The world has become very, very quiet.
We have been sitting on the taxi rank for ages. I have been here for two hours but so far nobody has wanted a taxi. Apart from not earning anything this is pretty good really, because I have got some reading to do for the college course, and also I am trying to write a book during quiet moments.
I will have finished it before the end of the week at this rate.
We are in the middle of the village, because there is absolutely no point in sitting on the taxi rank next to the lake. The jetties are all under water and the boats are not running.
The ticket offices are closed, and there is nobody there.
There are quite a few ducks, but none of them seem to want a taxi.
I do not think that we are going to make very much money tonight.
This is not the end of the world. We could always sell Roger Poopy. Dogs are expensive at the moment.
One of our neighbours has just purchased a dog. It is a chocolate brown labrador puppy, and it is small and adorably appealing.
She has also got five children. The puppy is so exhausted from a half term of intensive child-entertaining that it could hardly keep its eyes open when we inspected it this afternoon. It merely glanced at us without interest and yawned.
I like puppies, but am very glad that we do not have any at the moment. They are very lovely but prone to spontaneous defecation, and we have not had the new carpet for long enough for the novelty to have worn off yet.
We took our dogs out for a splash across the park this morning, which gave us an opportunity to examine the aftermath of the floods.
They do not appear to have been terrible floods, more uncontrolled puddles. You could see the height to which the beck water had risen before it sank away, and it was sufficient to be a terrific nuisance, but not to merit the BBC’s twaddle about a life-threatening weather crisis, certainly not in Windermere.
We have got a minor crisis of our own, however, which is that none of the washing has dried.
Of course we brought lots and lots of washing back with us. Not only have we worn smart clothes and scruffy clothes and change-for-dinner clothes, but of course the sheets in the camper van needed to be changed. The towels had become limp and dejected, and there was the usual collection of tea towels and dishcloths that all needed to be boiled back to gleaming whiteness at the end of a holiday.
We have washed it all over the last day or so, in a sort of washing-machine production line. We spread it over radiators and banisters and the backs of chairs until the house looked rather like Downton Abbey when the great family have gone off to London and Mrs. Hughes the housekeeper decides to sweep all the chimneys and polish the chandeliers.
Tiresomely none of it dried, and even though the house was not cold, this afternoon we had to light the fire.
After that the house was hot, and disconcertingly moist, even with the dehumidifiers on.
I pegged some of the washing outside this afternoon, but it didn’t dry there either, and the shirts that had flapped against the nasturtiums managed to come in wetter than they had gone out.
Mark has sawn up some firewood but we did not want to bring it in and stack it next to the fire because the wood was soaked as well, and we thought that we had got quite enough steaming things as it was.
In the end I opened the front door to let the steam escape, and with any luck by morning we will be starting to dry out again.
I am jolly glad we missed the actual wet bit.
