It has been a day off.
Mark has been building a log splitter.
This looks like something which could quite easily be swung from a crane with the purpose of dismantling a row of terraced houses. Certainly you would not wish accidentally to drop it on your toe.
It is going to swing one way and cut one log, then swing the other way and cut another, although not, as far as I can tell, from a crane.
I know this because I have been told. Inspection of it has left me no wiser in any capacity whatsoever. It is large, and devastating, and has caused a lot of sparks and flashes in the back yard, where it is currently occupying a very great deal of space.
Mark has explained that he is going to take it up to the farm and run it from a battery which will be charged up from the engine of the taxi as he drives. I have smiled and agreed and hoped that this happens soon.
He is going back to rural broadband installation tomorrow, so I will have to take extra care when traversing the yard in the dark.
Also on the calendar for tomorrow is Elspeth’s return and the departure of Farty The Dog.
I am almost sorry about this, because he has become brilliantly well behaved. He has had some small outbreaks of villainy, once when he broke out of the back yard when released for his waking-up bathroom visit, and once when he disappeared when Mark was loading some rusty things into the car at the farm.
Both times resulted in disgrace so terrible that he has not attempted either since, and we can now ignore him without the smallest anxiety.
Indeed, he has become the picture of gleaming black virtue. He has been trying so hard to do the right thing that I can hardly move without tripping over him, sitting alert and vigilant at my side, waiting for a new instruction that he can get right in order to be the recipient of elaborate praise.
There might even be a Good Dog Sausage.
I expect that is what has given him wind.
We went on a long walk this morning. This activity is, as you know, the preliminary to my engaging in a Creative Writing exercise, rather than being expressly for the benefit of the dogs, but they like charging about and the exercise helps to reduce the size of my bottom, so it is an easy route to virtue in every possible sense.
We had a long walk this morning, because I was pondering my crime story.
This was difficult because it had to be about a crime, but could only be five hundred words. You could write an extract from a novel if you could not manage to squeeze a complete story into five hundred words, but I thought that would be cheating and in any case have got absolutely no interest whatsoever in writing a crime novel. Anyway I wanted to do the difficult thing. This is because of showing off, which I like doing now that there is nobody to tell me that I mustn’t.
Our tutor writes crime novels, and has them published. I have not read any but I think that probably I should. I am really not very interested in crime stories, because of being frightened in the Library Gardens at night, but all the same I think I should give them a go, because she is such a good tutor.
One of the other tutors has put all of her own novels on the reading list. I rather admired this.
A complete short story in five hundred words is called Flash Fiction and it is difficult to get it right, so I went up over the fells to think hard and bellow at the dogs.
It was a rather splendid morning for walking, with mist sprawling over the lake and wreathing around the crags. The world was muffled and still, with no sound except for Roger Poopy’s lunatic barking and Rebel splashing as he tried to extricate himself from the mud in the tarn, and my brain-cogs whirring as I plodded thoughtfully along.
I wrote it when I got back.
It was called The Letter, and was exactly five hundred words and I felt very smug about it. I think probably I am becoming insufferable. It would serve me right if the Masters’s’ Degree people wrote to me and said: the other nine were all better than you, so get lost.
I hope they don’t.
