I have had some visitors.
It was an especial pleasure to have these visitors because they have been friends for years and years and years. One of them was the lodger, who I see quite often anyway even though she is no longer a lodger but a sort of additional low-budget daughter, and the other one was her new business manager.
I have known him since he was eleven, when he used to be Number Two Daughter’s best friend, and fifty percent of every adventure that got her into trouble. He is nearly forty now. They have grown into splendid young people, bright and funny and charming, and told me stories about their cleaning business. They are going to be millionaires before they are fifty, and I was very pleased, because they were remarkably rascally teenagers, and it is lovely to see them making their lives work so well.
I was quite glad to have visitors because it distracted me from my project of the day, which was to write my story. I am trying to write a thousand words every day. Today I had written eight hundred and sixty and then ran out. I have still not got any further than that but am going to have to go back to it before I go to work because it is the kiss of death to leave a story at a difficult bit. You have got to leave it at a place where it is going to be irresistibly exciting to come back to it and just write a bit more. I have made myself very late for bed doing that sometimes.
I have not been writing a story all day. This morning I braved the rain and biting cold in my shorts, because my legs dry faster than trousers, and hiked over the fell with the dogs. Roger Poopy is being a complete muppet at the moment. He is lost in forlorn sorrow because when Lucy came to visit she had a Man with her and there was no room for a little dog in her bed any more. He has been beside himself with pining ever since.
I am not terribly sympathetic, especially because he is plodding everywhere at the travelling speed of a doleful snail, and I have to keep turning back to bellow Hurry Up, Roger, For Goodness’ Sake. I got very cross with him in the Library Gardens in the middle of the night last night, because it was pouring with rain and he wouldn’t get on with it. Eventually I got cross, and then he decided to be frightened, and ran off in the other direction. I found him squatting mournfully among the laurel bushes, feeling alone and misunderstood, so I got cross with him again.
I felt guilty when we got home, because he was so sad, and offered him a leftover sausage by way of apology, but he was too grief-stricken to eat it.
He will get over it, poor abandoned Roger.
I am pleased to tell you that I have taken tiresome Prince Harry back to the library and am now in possession of the far more sensible Rory Stewart’s splendid memoir. The librarian and I agreed that he was definitely not a full shilling, Prince Harry, not Rory Stewart, obviously, and if either of us was going to write a memoir telling My Side Of The Story we would try a lot harder to make ourselves not look like a self-pitying lunatic. I managed to finish the book, but only just, and if the King ever reads these words, you have got all my sympathy, mate. He is off his rocker.
He tells us that he likes his friends to call him Hazzer.
Says it all, really.
I have remade Lucy’s bed with the clean sheets and I have cleaned out my taxi. I was pleased about this because it was a horribly damp and uninspiring morning, and I was wearing shorts and blowing my nose in a handkerchief soaked in Karvol. Really I would have liked to retreat to the kitchen fire with a cup of tea, but I did not. I was brave and sensible and now I will have a lovely clean taxi for work tonight, and can sit in it to read Rory Stewart’s book.
Oh, the rewards of virtue.
I will probably be able to read a lot of Rory Stewart’s book.
It is very quiet on the taxi rank at the moment.
