Today dawned bright and sunny.
Actually, that isn’t quite true, we were just on our way to bed when it dawned, which was around half past five, and at that time it was still distinctly wet and cheerless. Rather splendidly, however, by the time we re-emerged to take Lucy to work at eleven the skies were a sharp, clear blue and a warm breeze was scuttering around the garden.
We got up in rather a hurry then, so that we could hurl everything into the washing machine as fast as we could. It has rained here for days and days, and whenever I have washed anything it has had to be hung over the top of the unlit stove in the house, where it has just stayed, dangling unbeautifully around the living room, uninspiring, limp, and above all, not dry.
However, today was a perfect opportunity to boil the dog paw prints off the sheets, and we chucked everything hastily in the machine and then a couple of hours later we pegged it all on the washing line to billow over the garden in the sunshine.
When we went to work afterwards we spent the rest of the day looking anxiously at the skies and hoping that the weather gods would continue to smile on us in order that we would have the enormous blessing of being able to crawl between dry sheets at the day’s close.
It has been startlingly nice weather. The air has been loaded with a heavy scent of blossom, drifting across the taxi rank in small eddies with the breeze over the lake, and enlivened by interesting digestive smells emitted by the horse pulling the See The Lakes From A Horse And Carriage.
This also parks on the taxi rank when it is not plodding unenthusiastically around the Glebe laden with shrieking children and their portly parents. People feed it on chunks of Kendal Mint Cake, which might be related to the flatulence. It is a nice horse, called Banjo and much more patient with the tourists who want to put their hands on its nose and take photographs than I could ever imagine that I might be. By this stage of the summer it has become difficult to be charming to anybody who is not in the market for handing out a tip, although I suppose that if you are a horse the Kendal Mint Cake satisfies exactly the same function.
This is one of the unfortunate things about the summer. In Maytime, like the incoming spring, we are all enthusiastic and fresh and optimistic: by August it has almost completely worn off. My inner Miserable Old Boot is fast becoming an outer Miserable Old Boot, as the traffic jams seethe through the village and a never-ending stream of hopeful holidaymakers pause their busy lives to wander as lonely as the clouds along the lakeshore and eat ice cream and take their children to look at the Peter Rabbit Exhibition. We are all getting tired now: it will almost be a relief to get to November and know that there is no longer the dreadful danger of messily flattening a Japanese tourist who has inexplicably leapt into the road to find a better angle to take a picture of the Co-op.
Unusually today, the breeze was warm rather than bracing, which is not a normal state of affairs, this is Windermere and not the Mediterranean, and the sun shone for most of the day, until eventually the clouds started to outnumber the tourists.
I dashed home and dragged the dry sheets hastily off the washing line and in to the house just before the skies opened, and then it rained until there were small but tiresome floods dotted along the Newby Bridge Road, which is a dramatic way of saying that there were very big puddles. The Newby Bridge Road gets some spectacular puddles, especially in the autumn when the drains are blocked with falling leaves. One of our drivers sank a taxi in one once.
We finished for the night with some relief at around ten o’clock, and came home to put the sheets on the bed. They are white and crisp and have a faint scent of mint and lavender and fennel from the garden still clinging to them, which is lovely, it is the first thing that I notice as I walk in to the bedroom.
I don’t at all mind about the rain. We got the sheets dry in the end. It has been such an exhausting weekend: but in a very short while we will be able to slide into a fresh, clean bed.
We can stay there for absolutely ages.
