I am in the best possible spirits today.
I do not know why I am feeling so unaccountably cheerful, because as far as I can tell, there is no difference whatsoever between yesterday or the day before, and today.
I had another ten hours’ sleep last night, which might have helped.
Whatever it is, I bounced out of bed this morning feeling that the world is very much a jolly good place in which to be alive, and the dogs and I were pludging through the mud on the fells before it was even ten o’clock.
Pludging is a word invented by Number Two Daughter in her extreme youth, to describe walking through mud in her wellies. I thought it fitted very well and have saved it for appropriate occasions since then. This morning was one of them. It has rained a very great deal here just lately, and there have been cows on the fells. Some bits, especially the cows’ favourite bits, would have embarrassed the person who designed the trenches for the poor misfortunate World War One soldiers.
It is very, very muddy indeed. Some bits are not actually passable, because the mud goes over the top of my boots, and have to be skirted round with a slightly drier detour. I have to keep an eye on Rosie. It is entirely possible that an indiscriminate leap could see her vanish for eternity.
It was a very lovely pludge for all that. There were more than a dozen skylarks calling and diving on the fell-top, and I heard another bird that I have never heard before. I stopped and listened, but do not know what it was. It had a deeper note than the others, a sort of cross between a bittern and a robin. It is not easy to look things up on Google when the only information you have is that you think it is probably singing roughly the note of F, the one after Middle C, and so I suppose I shall have to remain in ignorance until I can actually see it, if indeed it is still there tomorrow.
When I returned I was still feeling unaccountably cheerful, and set to cutting the last of the firewood. The builders have been otherwise engaged over the last few days, probably in building something rather than demolishing it, and the supply of firewood has dried up. I am only mildly anxious, and mostly profoundly relieved about this. It is nice not to have to spend a couple of hours every day agonising about my fingers and getting covered in sawdust.
Anyway, I cut it up and stacked it to dry, following which I could dash off for the highlight of the day.
I have been looking forward to this for ages.
I had got a haircut booked.
Not only that, but I had not yet spent the Waterstones voucher so generously donated by Number One Daughter for Mothering Tuesday.
I had an uninterrupted hour ambling contentedly around Waterstones. Things improved yet further when I overspent the voucher amount – of course – and was just digging reluctantly for my purse when the girl on the till chirped up: “Oh, you’ve got ten pounds on your Waterstones card, shall I just use that instead?”
I bounced off to the hairdresser for a scalp massage and to be thoroughly shorn. I had begun to look like a crow’s nest, nicely padded out with sawdust and the dog hair, and was very glad indeed for my tresses to be reduced to a single inch. I am so glad I have outgrown the teenage taste for fairy-princess hairstyles. Bald is so much less trouble.
By the time I got home I was feeling so pleased with the world that I instructed Google to play Brighouse And Rastrick’s Greatest Hits, and hopped cheerily around the kitchen cooking sausages for Mark’s return. Then I was feeling so energetically cheerful that I dashed outside and cleaned out my taxi.
There can be no finer incitement to good spirits than a brass band. I am very glad I was not born in the south.
I wonder why it is so much easier to do all the things that will cheer you up when you are feeling cheerful already. I looked at my taxi during my Dispirited Day and knew that I would like it to be clean, and also that I absolutely did not want to bother.
I am out at work in it now. It still does not have an exhaust, and is sounding rather like an MRI scan. I have learned today that MRI scans make terrible banging and growling and crunching noises, and so have saved the simile. Also its squeak has come back, but it does not matter.
Mark will be home tonight.
