Dearie me

Elspeth rang this morning to tell me that it is raining in the Lake District.

I would like you to know that here in Surrey the sun is shining, and although it is not exactly warm, I was quite surprised when Number One Daughter was complaining about the cold so much last night that they put the central heating on.

I think this is lovely. I would like very much to live in a world which was warm all the time and do not in the least see why everybody is grumbling about it so much. It isn’t going to be very exciting anyway, the very best case is that everywhere is going to warm up by one and a half degrees, which is certainly not enough to make me rush for the sun cream and my swimming costume. I can jolly well promise you that one and a half degrees warmer in the Lake District will not even make it sufficiently warm to take my thermal vest off.

Surrey is lovely, though.

Oliver has gone. He has been clad in Number One Daughter’s motorcycling jacket, helmet and boots, and is off to the airport, clinging on tightly behind Number One Son-In-Law, for his Big Adventure.

It is certainly going to be a big adventure. We are all agog with curiosity to know what is going to happen to him. This morning I tried to transfer some of Oliver’s money to his friend’s father’s bank account, to cover theme park entries, exciting Korean food and other eventualities, but the bank would not let me. First they just declined the payment. Then they rang me up. Then I rang them back, and sat on the phone for ages and ages whilst they transferred me from one department to another, all asking me questions about exactly how well I know Oliver’s friend’s father.

The answer, as you know, was ‘not at all’. I was obliged to confess that I had never met him, did not know what he did for a living, could not exactly confirm in which country he was probably based, and generally was unable to sound convincing.

I see, said the bank’s fraud department, and how old is this child that you are sending to visit this Korean stranger?

They refused point blank to make the payment, and would not tell me why they were so sure that it was going to enrich a cyber-criminal, so I was no wiser.

When I hung up and emailed the friend’s father in question he suddenly remembered that he had a house in the UK as well, with an English bank account.

It is all very exciting. I have warned Oliver about how to avoid being abducted and murdered, and he hasn’t got any money anyway, so I suppose it will be all right.

He has transferred most of his money to our bank account for safe-keeping, although frankly it might be safer with a Korean abductor.

We spent last night in the camper van, but the dogs had spent the whole day asleep whilst we came down the motorway, and were not sleepy. As soon as the dawn had brightened the sky Rosie was awake, and decided to defend us all from peril by standing on the front seats of the van and growling and barking menacingly out of the windows at anybody who walked past.

This did not make her popular, I can promise you. Fortunately for Rosie we were too sleepy actually to leap out of bed and dive into the front to have a violent revenge on her small waggy person, and so we just bellowed at her, crossly, which made her shut up for about two or three minutes every time.

Nobody would give her any of their bacon sandwich at breakfast time, so that will jolly well teach her.

LATER NOTE:  It is the middle of the night. Regrettably Number One Son-In-Law has been demonstrating a masterclass-style ability to make whisky sour. They were excellent. That it, the first few were. I don’t really remember the last ones.

We are now not entirely in possession of all our faculties and I am going to have a hangover tomorrow, also Number Two Daughter might be disgruntled because of intoxicated midnight telephone calls.

Dearie me, oh dearie me…