Moving on swiftly

I can hardly believe how impossibly quickly the summer has galloped away.

Already we are lurching at high speed towards the bank holiday, and August is almost over.

I do not know why I usually have such high hopes for August to be the gloriously sizzling height of summer, when we all know really that it is monsoon season. It is Monday, and Clean Sheets Day, so I pegged everything in the garden hopefully, because in true Cumbrian style it was only raining a little bit.

Ten minutes later it was raining a lot.

I looked at the weather indicator on my telephone, which said that it would stop raining in ten minutes, so I left the sheets where they were and went off to get on with everything else.

It did not stop raining in ten minutes. The heavens opened and the sheets were given a thorough rinse. Eventually, reluctantly, I gave up and brought them all in. I spent ten minutes redistributing sheets and pillowcases all over the house, and then dashed off to Booths for some ethical cheese, at which point the clouds disappeared like a pile of abandoned tenners at a bus stop. The sun beamed forth and a merry little breeze whipped up, and I stood in Booths car park shaking my fist at the sky and telling the Gods what I thought of them.

When I got home I hung the washing out again.

We played the same game a little while later.

We might be sleeping in wet sheets tonight if things do not improve.

As I write I am on the taxi rank, because I am trying to earn enough cash to put fuel in the camper van to collect Oliver from Heathrow on Thursday. The sheets were not dry when I came out to work, so I left them in the garden, where they were flapping nicely.

I am watching the sky with great anxiety. If I do not finish up with a stress-related illness brought about by chronic washing difficulties it will not be the Weather Gods’ fault.

Other than that I have made fudge and coffee chocolate. Yesterday I made banana and fig cake, because of a leftover banana, and because we have grown figs in the conservatory. I am quite proud of this. In any case I am busily filling all tins with edible items because of the trip to Heathrow, and also because a very few days after that we will be setting off north again, ready for the new school term, so we will need to feed ourselves on the way. I am doing it all now because the weekend is the last bank holiday of the summer, and so I will be so busy raking in pots of tourist cash that I will not have time to even think about cooking.

I am hoping for a profitable weekend, because all of the motorway-chugging is going to cost a fortune. I have covered about four pages of my shopping-list book with related calculations. It says things like Fuel For Heathrow £200, and then Parking with a question mark next to it, because that is a charge which has no sensibly predictable limit. I added it all up twice because when I did it the first time I couldn’t believe the answer, but it turned out to be right which is why I am at work.

I am ticking things off the lists as we have managed to put together the cash for them, but I am sanguine about it all really. This is the very last year that Oliver will be at school, and this time next year we will not be going north. Before the end of the year we will be investing in a dinner jacket for end-of-school revelries, and he will grow out of it as soon as he discovers beer and pies in his newly independent student life.

We do not yet know where we will be going for the commencement of his beer-and-pie career, because Oliver has not yet quite decided what he wants to do when he grows up. I sympathise with this difficulty because I haven’t either, although I have thought of several things. I suppose really I ought to make my mind up soon, because I will be sixty in a year or two, and if there is an upper age limit for apprenticeships I will probably have missed out.

I will let you know if either of us think of anything.