I am on the taxi rank, feeling optimistic.
I am in this frame of mind because it would appear that the Eastertime revellers are beginning to descend upon the Lake District, and in the half an hour I have been here so far I have already made twenty quid. This is an encouraging beginning to any evening, and already I am imagining how I might spend it.
I must have become dull in my old age because nothing especially thrilling is on the wishing-list. Bananas, cheese and yoghurt are in the top five so far. An evening at the opera followed by a late-night dinner had not even entered into my thinking until I started to consider it for the purposes for mentioning it here.
I recall doing that in my youth, and nothing could have been more exciting. An evening of overdressed theatre followed by dinner at midnight seemed like the height of grown-up sophistication. Now I am actually grown up it would just give me indigestion, and evening dress always makes me fidget. In any case I don’t think you can get midnight dinners in many places any more, but you could then. I recall a beautiful Chinese restaurant in the heart of Manchester which had the most enormous Chinese thug on the door. There was always a table full of Triads playing some game in the corner, probably the sort where you forfeited a finger if you lost, and an exhausted clientele of opera-goers, saturated by Papageno and the Queen of the Night, eating food which in those days was so exotically foreign as to be practically enchanted.
I am glad I have done it even if I have graduated into elderly dullness since. Those were splendid times.
These times are splendid as well, although in a rather more muted fashion. The blackbird has returned to the back yard, although he has disloyally settled himself into residence next door for most of his time, probably because of the well-stocked bird table. Rosie likes this as well, and has to be shouted at whenever next door forgets and leaves the gate open.
Mark has gone away and I am here by myself.
He is not offshore. He has gone off to Lucy’s house to help her rebuild it.
Of course like any new house it is going to take some settling in, and in this case the whole kitchen is going to come out and be replaced with a new one. My brother has delivered the kitchen, which he has removed from somebody sufficiently wealthy to consider upgrading even before everything has fallen apart, and it all looks very nice. Certainly it appears to be an improvement on the one she has got at the moment, which is falling apart, and it is going to make her house look lovely.
There is a wall to be knocked down, some doorways to be inserted, another doorway to be bricked up, and a very great deal of painting and fixing to be done.
I would like to go down and help, and don’t mind admitting that I felt a mild pang of disappointment as the camper van chugged away into the sunset without me yet again, but there is no help for it. Oliver is home and in need of parental nurturing whilst he labours away in front of the kitchen sink in the Albert, and as always, we need to be earning cash.
If I don’t do that bit then there are no other volunteers, so I am just getting on with it. If Oliver gets a couple of days off this week then perhaps we can rush off after them and do our bit throwing things into a skip, but until he gets home from work this evening I do not know if he is going to get any time off at all.
His presence caused something of a false start to the day. In the usual pattern of weekends we worked late last night, but then had to stagger blearily out of bed by half past nine this morning in order to convey him to work. It seems that as one gets older one can no longer manage to achieve anything of much import without the full recommended eight hours of slumber, and after a couple of half-hearted attempts we just crawled back into bed, where we wasted much of the rest of the day.
This was a tiresome outcome, because the sun was shining, and my soul, although not my body, yearned to pull on my boots and go up the fells for a bit of voyeurism at the lustful springtime frogs. Tomorrow it is going to rain, but I am going to go all the same.
It will be a happy highlight in the middle of Clean Sheets Day.
