Octopodes

I am just dropping you a quick line before I go out to work. I do not like writing on these pages whilst I am on the taxi rank, although obviously I do, often. Nevertheless there are more Persons From Porlock milling about Bowness on a Friday night than you would like to think about, and after a little while it makes me bad-tempered and irritable.

It has been a busy, if not terrifically productive day. It would appear that my own lack of productivity has been more than adequately compensated by both Lucy and Oliver having very busy days. Oliver has done some physics prep that has been worrying him, and has now buzzed off to work, and Lucy has done absolutely everything that a virtuous person can be expected to do ever. She has joined the gym and done her shopping and cleaned all of her kitchen cupboards and hoovered her living room.

I am impressed. I have not hoovered our living room since Monday although it is not too bad now that the dogs do not have any hair to leave on the carpet. In fact it is a perfect carpet for not being hoovered, because it has such an astonishingly detailed pattern that you could not hope to notice any mishap deposited upon it. This has not necessarily been a good thing on the few occasions when the dogs have been unexpectedly unwell.

Lucy said that really she has done lots of very virtuous things because of having a dissertation to write. I sympathise with that. It is amazing how interesting hoovering can become when one has an assignment with a looming deadline.

I have had a pleasingly creative afternoon, and my dystopian Octopus Invasion is coming along nicely. Incidentally, for the pedantic, the correct plural of Octopus is not Octopi but Octopuses. This is because Octopus is not Latin but Greek, and indeed, Stephen Fry, that master of all things famously English, believes that if one were to be entirely pedantic one should say Octopodes, but one doesn’t, mostly because nobody would have the first idea what you were going on about.

Anyway, I deleted everything I wrote yesterday, not without a groan and a downcast moment, but it was monumentally boring. I wrote something different today which was much better. Well, I thought it was better. Nobody else has read it and so I do not have an independent judgement on the subject, but if there are any volunteers I would happily dispatch them a copy. So far I have written twenty eight pages. Mark has read them but he just thinks everything is splendid, and so does not count.

Other than that I have had my usual daily thoughtful constitutional, doing my bit to erode the Cumbrian footpaths. I have washed things and swept things and organised things and now I am going to work.

Number Two Daughter telephoned whilst I was on my walk. She was on a walk with her dog, on the other side of the world, and thought that we could share the experience, what a magnificent world we live in. She is having a difficult time because she has got bat flu and although it appears that Canada is no longer a lunatic state with concentration camps for anybody who drives a truck, she is still not going to work and is feeling tired.

I told her, helpfully, about when we had bat flu, because we were jolly tired. I remember our first day out of bed, when we tried to empty the dogs and could not make it as far as the end of the alley. We got better a little bit at a time, until eventually we could make it to the far end of the park, and then once we had a little sit down on the bench, we could go home.

Number Two Daughter said that she was not that sick and would probably be better soon. I hope so. It is very horrible.

Right, you know all of my adventures now.

I am off to earn our fortunes.