It is still too hot to write.
It is not as hot here as it is in London but it is still very hot.
I have hardly taken the dogs out for the whole day because of the pavements burning their paws. They are all right in the yard, which is cool, and when we went to the park I chucked all of them in the beck, just for a swill off. They did not appreciate this at the time but afterwards they all perked up hugely, and belted around until the sun got to them again.
There is a new sign up in the park that made me very cross. It says that persons with dogs have got to carry poo bags and must produce them on demand if an Authorised Officer wants them to.
I have never heard of dog wardens being issued with powers of Stop And Search, and am entirely disgruntled. Unless any dog warden can produce a warrant for my arrest and tell me what the charges are, they can get stuffed. There aren’t even any black people here to occupy them doing disproportionate numbers of searches and so the whole nuisance will land on all the rest of us.
I think I am nearly middle class now, and so I will just get huffy and demand that my solicitor is present.
I haven’t ever seen any dog wardens here but that is not the point. South Lakeland Council are just getting too big for their boots. I am not impressed.
I am on the taxi rank, and not going to write much more because it is too hot and in any case I am too busy. We have had a very hot day because I have been doing the cooking for our holiday next week. Oliver has been helping me and we have had both ovens going. It has been entirely horrible.
We have made cakes and biscuits, prawn toast and cheese and onion pies, fudge and peppermint chocolates, swirly tomato bread and lamb kebabs with Peshwari rice.
Oliver helped me for the whole day.
I was very grateful. I wouldn’t have managed half of it without his assistance. He did an awful lot of the rubbish part of cooking, like washing up and dashing off to the shops for things I had misfortunately forgotten, but he did quite a bit of the stirring and swearing sort of cooking as well, and the fudge and peppermint chocolates were almost entirely produced by him.
Worse, he had hardly finished when he had to dash off to work and do the whole thing again somewhere else. This turned into a very sad evening when he discovered that Ginge, the mildly unhinged but otherwise much admired chef, had unfastened his apron in the sweltering lunchtime kitchen and told the management to get stuffed.
Oliver misses him. I have never met him but am sorry that he has gone, because Oliver enjoyed his company and learned lots from him, not least that it is important to listen at school if you do not wish to finish up cooking chicken nuggets and pizzas for ungrateful tourists in a Lake District pub.
Having said that I am not in the least surprised that he has gone. Cooking hundreds of lunches, by yourself in a steaming Lake District kitchen in an August heatwave, must have been superlatively horrible. The manager was cooking tonight. I expect he appreciated Ginge, if somewhat retrospectively, by the end of it.
Oliver staggered home, absolutely exhausted, by ten o’clock, aching and overheated from a day and night of scullery-maiding in the baking heat. I popped in from the taxi rank to make sympathetic noises.
He could barely climb the stairs.
I have almost finished now, and am longing for my own conclusion to the day.
I think it might have arrived.
No diary tomorrow, being Saturday, and possibly not on Sunday either, because we are planning to go away. This won’t be until late but I will have had enough of the world by then and will probably wish to subside into effortless book-perusal.
Cambridge has sent me a stack of poems to read. I have read one so far. I do not think I am a natural poet.
Until next time.
