It is Sunday afternoon, and so warm and lovely that for the first time this year I am seriously contemplating some clout-casting.
I haven’t done it but I have thought about it. I am still wearing my thermal vest. You can’t be too careful. I wouldn’t want to be cold.
My grandfather once told me that his mother greased him and his brothers with goose-fat at the beginning of the winter, and then sewed them into brown-paper vests. They stayed dressed in these until the springtime.
I do not think that this is any longer recommended by self-help parenting guides, but since they lived into their eighties it obviously didn’t do any harm. It might be worth some consideration if the Government do not get their act together about the financial crisis, never say never.
I do not wear brown paper. I put a clean thermal vest on every morning, but if this good weather continues I might consider leaving them in the drawer.
What an exciting life.
The washing is drying nicely, though, and Mark and the dogs have disappeared off to the farm. Mark is busily planting his garden and the dogs are busy charging about barking at things. When Roger Poopy buzzed off the other day he was not even wearing a collar, because he had been wearing one to the farm and had rolled in some badger poo, with which it had become horribly encrusted, and so I had removed it, in some disgust. It is on the washing line as I write.
Mark is having a very happy time. He has planted potatoes and sweet potatoes and Yakons and garlic. These will sustain us through the financial crisis, as long as it does not turn up too soon, because obviously they will take a while to come up. We have still got a few parsnips left over from last year, and he brought some home yesterday. They are nice made into soup with pears and coriander.
He is having some ownership issues with a resident rabbit. This is made more difficult because of being halfway through listening to Watership Down, which is not complimentary about men with guns and snares, and it would be terrible to be the Man who finally brought down El-Ahrairah.
He says that we will only eat it if times get really hard, and that first we will try and fence it out of the carrot patch.
Times are not hard yet. We had a busy night last night. I had one exciting moment when I was flagged by some doormen and asked to take an unwell customer home.
I was reluctant to agree to this, unwell customers tend to involve a lot of cleaning up, but they assured me that he was genuinely unwell and not drunk, and that in any case he was one of a group of off-duty policemen.
When he got in I could see that he really was terribly unwell. He was white, and clutching his chest, and I offered to take him to the hospital instead.
They all said that this would not be necessary, and that he just needed to get back to their hostel where he had his dialysis equipment, so off we went.
It was quite a way away, and he was crying in pain.
This was an awful dilemma. He lived at the end of a long county road with a forty mile speed limit, which can comfortably be navigated at sixty…but they were all policemen.
After a few moments I decided that the law was an ass, told them to hold on to their hats and put my foot down.
We flew along the country lanes as fast as I could go, hurtling round corners at top speed.
He staggered out at the other end and his friends carried him in.
They did not prosecute me and gave me a tip, so I suppose it turned out all right in the end, but it was very upsetting all the same.
I am going to go and get ready for work.
Still no swifts.
