I saw a pair of hunting buzzards and a heron on my walk this morning.
The buzzards were absolutely huge, with a wingspan considerably more than a metre across. They were circling first above us, then when we got to the top of the fell, below us, and they looked easily big enough to take a young lamb, and certainly a rabbit.
I kept a close eye on Rosie when I thought at one point they might be inspecting her with some interest, but they ignored her and slowly sailed off to investigate some activity with a tractor which might be resulting in fleeing field mice.
The tractor belonged to a farmer who is friends with Mark and had a terrible rattle. I strolled contentedly down the hill, thinking, not for the first time, how very glad I was not to be a farmer.
It was an exciting sort of walk, because one of the fields has recently been populated with young bullocks. These have taken to mooching around by the gate, obviously because it is the only place where anything interesting is likely to happen, and we have to push our way through to get out.
This is an exciting activity when you are only wearing flip-flops.
Our cause is not helped by Rosie’s absolute dread of all things cow-like. She is torn between her dreadful anxiety about what might happen if she disobeys my instruction to walk quietly to heel, and her agony of terror about picking her way, quietly, between all of those enormous hooved feet.
This morning she compromised by walking with the others at my heels, where she was supposed to be, but keeping up a low, rumbling growl, with her little teeth bared, the whole time. I was cross with her about this, but the cows did not seem to mind, and swung their heavy heads around curiously, searching for the peculiarly menacing noise somewhere around their ankles.
I like the smell of cows. It reminds me of our own cow-owning past, which is joyful in retrospect, but obviously was a complete nuisance at the time. Today the rattly tractor was Somebody Else’s Problem.
After that I took Oliver to the optician, because his eyesight has become increasingly rubbish, and because he is completing the self-beautification project by exchanging his glasses for contact lenses.
He is going to be very beautiful in a couple of years time, when his teeth are straight and he has acquired muscles from his endless sessions in the gym, and when his glasses have disappeared.
The optician showed him how to put the contact lenses in his eyes and take them out again, which made me shudder. Lucy has contact lenses as well, but I do not think I want to be beautiful quite so much. It seems an entirely horrible process, involving poking yourself in the eyes at least twice a day, and really I do not at all mind my glasses. There are worse things than being plain.
After the optician we rushed off to Ulverston where he was spending the rest of the afternoon on the climbing wall, run by a friend of Number One Son-In-Law’s. whom we like very much, although I am mildly disappointed to discover that in the end he has grown into a sensible sort of person. He had entertaining teenage years, which I will not describe here, except to mention that their little group of friends had a game called Naked Surprise, which they played upon one another, and which occasionally, to the astonishment of passers by, led to the occasional unexpected social faux-pas, accompanied by rather unconvincing explanations and excuses.
I will spare you the details. You can use your imaginations.
I left Oliver there to learn about boy things, for Mark to collect on his way home from work, and came home to discover the sausages on fire in the oven and the dogs on the sofa with their lovely fresh butcher’s bones.
I did not want to think about any of it.
I came to work instead.
