Dampener on things

It is the beginning of a wet weekend in the Lake District, and somehow the dreariness has been all-encompassing. I have had a day filled with unexciting busy things, and am now gazing out from the taxi rank at a village where the traditional British summertime has produced a sudden blooming of umbrellas.

It is so wet and gloomy that I have had to light the fire to get the washing dry. This cheered the day a little. Nothing is more dreary than the drab greyness of a wet day in July, and I am completely unable to produce any sympathy for our whingeing Continental neighbours who are going on and on about their sufferings in the horrid sunshine.

It is a good job we have come out of Europe or we might have been obliged to share it, how terrible that would have been.

Just to add insult to injury the mighty Internet is still going on about the weather being because of Global Warming. I would be jolly pleased to have some global warming today. I have got a jersey on, and everybody who has come to the Lake District for an uplifting and invigorating summer holiday is trudging through the puddles, looking glum.

The house is full of damp washing. I hung it in the yard twice before I had to give up, sulkily.

Other than that I do not seem to have achieved very much. I checked my email, in case an agent had written to me admiring my story, but nobody had. I cooked some sausages and forgot them, so they went black. Then I made a huge jug of tea for work to which I forgot to add the tea leaves, and so it didn’t go black. Fortunately I discovered this omission before it became too late, you will be relieved to hear that I am not in the taxi without tea, how awful that would be. Also it does not matter about the sausages, because only Mark eats them and he likes them to be black.

I made a little foray through the splashing raindrops out to the camper van, where fortunately we left the clean sheets yesterday, otherwise they would have become wet sheets just on the short journey across the road. I made all the beds up, so that the van is neatly filled with fresh sheets and towels, and everybody can pretend they are staying in an hotel when we go to Blackpool in a few weeks.

We have not booked a trip to Blackpool but if the weather is looking hopeful I think we will go. I have had some customers in my taxi from Blackpool who have said that the council are trying hard to organise an air of middle class ambiance about the place, and that a new luxury hotel has been built there. I liked this idea very much, although our current budget means that we will probably go in the camper van anyway.  

The camper van is very full now that the children are normally large-sized people, and of course there are the cats and dogs, which tend not to be welcomed in luxury hotels, certainly I would not stay in one where they were, but if the sun shines we will spill out on to the roadside and hardly notice. Fortunately the children have grown past the stage where they would like to go to the terrible water park, or even to Jungle Jim’s. Our holiday will be more tranquilly passed in simply ambling along the beach and eating doughnuts, although we might possibly visit the funfair. This does not matter. We can get our photograph taken dressed up as Victorians and purchase some unnecessary ornament manufactured out of shells and revisit all of our memories.

I am sure you will be gripped by another update on my toe, I bashed it today, which made the nail jiggle ominously, and then filled my flip-flop with yet another revolting squirt of biology. This made me shout ungrateful things at the Gods and reach for the drugs again. It feels better when it has got a bandage on it, mostly because I can’t see it. For the concerned, well, Mum, actually, it is not infected. It is clean, merely leaky. Broken bits of oneself tend to be sore until they repair themselves, which it has not done yet, it has only been a week. 

It feels like for ever. The mighty Internet thinks it might take two years.

It is going to make these pages very tedious reading if it does, I can tell you.