I have not had many adventures but have written to you to tell you about them anyway. If you are not in the mood for some vaguely contemplative but uninformative mental milling about, you could try again tomorrow.
We have sunshine.
This is delightful.
Even here in the Lake District the days have been bright and clear, and even warm. The yard has been filled with cheerily-flapping sheets and towels and blankets for two whole days now, and everywhere I look there is a cat stretched out, blissfully mopping up the sunshine like a furry sponge.
It feels like such a lovely, Indian sort of summer. I hope it is Global Warming and lasts for weeks.
Mark has been over at the farm. He has brought home buckets full of new potatoes and parsnips, and some of the most stunning, enormous gladioli that I have ever seen. Some of them are a beautiful heavy magenta, the others have pale pink petals with a secretive dark pink heart, you can practically see them pulsing.
He grows these because he knows I like to have flowers in the house, which I do, very much. Frankly for me he need not bother with the parsnips, which are about a pound for a bag when they are in season. I would just fill the house with flowers. It is nice to have parsnips in the fridge but not that nice, even when I make them into soup with cream and celery and ginger. Actually that is very nice indeed, although better in the winter.
It is going to be winter quite soon. Obviously you can work this out for yourselves and do not need me to tell you, it is one of those rhetorical things that you say when you are feeling pensive, which I am. The swifts are gone now, and in a very few weeks the leaves will start to fall, as I suppose you have noticed perfectly well already. I am getting a bit flappy because we are not yet ready for winter, we had better hurry up. I need to stack some sacks of flour under my desk over the next few weeks. I am starting to feel very seasonally twitchy
We are already getting on with these preparations. Mark has already filled all of the sheds with wood, and we have, of course, been rushed off our feet with the sunny-weekend influx of tourists, which has been marvellous. We have paid our bills and even started to save up for the next Northern adventure. We have a rule that we are not allowed to spend Scottish notes when we get them in the taxis. We have got to save them for going to Scotland. We are not allowed to spend two pound coins either. We have got to save those for Christmas. I was obliged to give one to somebody in their change this evening in an emergency, and felt thoroughly aggrieved, as if they were stealing from the children’s stockings, the rotters.
We will not be going to Scotland again until half term, but diesel prices are once again rising like the water level in the Titanic, so we think we had better be prudent.
We still have Lucy at home, although she is setting off on her long journey south tomorrow. Mark is going a little way with her, because her car is in need of some new tyres, and they are going to put them on in Morecambe, but after that she will be gone, and once again we will be chickless.
It is sunny so I can wash all of her sheets and towels, hurrah.
I am sitting on the taxi rank and have just been interrupted by a very friendly couple who have been admiring the camper van. They told me that they have seen it on all sorts of social websites. Of course I knew this, because we always park it in the same place, and it has become something of a feature in the village landscape. The last time we were visiting Lucy we stopped at the Tesco petrol pumps in Kettering, and a gentleman came over to ask us if we had been in Windermere three weeks earlier. Very occasionally people send me a magazine in which it has featured, and indeed, it seems to have developed a little social life all of its own, I discovered recently that it it has a page on Trip Advisor, which explains boringly that we are not hippies nor adventurers. I did not write on it. I do not know who did.
I have washed the towels and cloths and cat-sick sheets ready to refurbish it. It will be nice to leave it feeling fresh.
Oliver has telephoned and is having a happy time, I can hardly believe that it is almost over. I have been looking back through my diary pages and remembering his first departure for school, and suddenly we are reaching the last.
Even reading back through my diary it is difficult to tell what I have done with the time.
A lot of dusting, probably.
PS.I warned you
PPS. Rosie might be expecting.
