I am not going to write much because I am on holiday. I am gazing contentedly out of the window at the sea, and writing is just too difficult.
I have also drunk a glass of wine already, which is not helping.
We are in the camper van, on the beach at Ulverston.
It is Mark’s birthday.
We have had a lovely day. My parents came to join us for lunch. This worked out very usefully, because I cooked all of the things that we will eat for the rest of the week in the taxi, and so I am hardly going to have to do anything for the next few days. The house is clean, we have got cooked sausages and chicken legs, cake and salad and fish: and more cheese than any family could ever eat, unless it is ours. We can eat a very lot of cheese.
It has been splendid. The children sent Mark a bottle of single malt, with instructions that he is to drink it whenever he likes, which he had jolly well better not, and some divine-smelling aftershave. I gave him some useful things that he was relieved about, like some steel toe-capped boots to replace the ones that he has worn and worn until they have begun to creak apart. We would have had to buy these anyway but his birthday was a good excuse. My parents gave him some raspberry canes and two different sorts of hoe. The hoes are for different sorts of assault on your weeds. I tried to look interested but wasn’t really. Mark was very pleased indeed, though, because this was exactly what he wanted. He considered going straight to the farm as soon as they had gone, to plant the raspberries and hoe his weeds without further delay, and had to be firmly reminded that we had decided to come to the beach, so even though it is his birthday he will just have to wait.
It was a lovely lunch. I had made a fruit mousse cheesecake, which rather to my surprise had set perfectly. Uncertainty on this matter had been troubling me in the stilly watches of the night. This sort of pudding, involving faffing about with puréed fruit, whipped cream and jelly, has the potential to go unpredictably and disastrously wrong, although only on special occasions when it really matters, never when you have just done it because you have got a ton of leftover blackberries and some cream about to go off. This calamity seems to occur for no reason at all that I can see, other than the whims of some Catering Gods with a malicious sense of humour. Fortunately, this time they must have been looking the other way, because it worked out just fine.
I know I have hardly written anything, but I think I have written enough. I have had another glass of wine since I started, and also taken a break to go for a long amble along the beach. There is a blackbird in full voice in the tree beside the van, and an occasional seagull-cry. Every now and again little pipistrel bats come hurtling past the windows, and a tawny owl is calling in the thicket. Other than that there is nothing but the sea and the fast-darkening sky. We can see lights across the bay in the distance, so close yet impossibly distant, and lighting up a thousand unknowable lives. I have stared at these until I became comfortably lost in the sort of philosophical speculation that is only possible after a couple of glasses of wine, and Mark started to doze off.
Enough is enough. It has been Mark’s birthday, but I have enjoyed it just as much as if it had been my own.
I am going to go to bed.
