I have had a very splendid day.
I have done absolutely everything that I set out to do this morning, and although I was a bit late for work in consequence, nothing much is happening here so nobody cares.
It has been raining. Indeed, it is still raining. This is actually more irritating than one might expect, but only because I have discovered that in addition to the reversing light on my car coming on all of the time, so does the rear windscreen wiper. This helpfully comes on whenever I put the front windscreen wipers on, because it thinks, in consequence of the faulty switch, that I am going backwards and need it to make tooth-squeaking scratchy noises behind me.
I find the scratchy noises infuriating, and am hoping that it stops raining soon.
It rained this morning for my walk, and for the first time ever I was actually rather excited about this development, because it meant I could try out my new Mountain Warehouse waterproofs.
I zipped them all up and trudged off up the fell side, and am pleased to announce that I stayed as dry as a woke virtue-signalling vegan in January.
Actually that isn’t quite true. My hair got wet because I can’t bear the rustling sound of a waterproof around my ears, and so I took the hood off. It was a bit odd anyway, screening off all of my peripheral vision, as if I had taken Perpetual Vows and donned a coif and wimple.
This is not a likely outcome to my career.
It was rather splendid, very still, and not at all cold, and heavy with the smells of autumn, mud and hawthorn and brambles. Better still, when I got back to my car and peeled my coat off, I discovered that it was long enough that I did not need to remove the waterproof trousers before I sat on the driver’s seat, and all of my nether regions were perfectly dry.
The dogs were sodden. Sometimes it is just a dog’s life.
When I got back I busied myself with the new nuisance job I have created for myself, which is making sushi. This is because Booths has not had my favourite sort on their shelves for ages now, and in any case, making sushi costs roughly half of the price of purchasing it ready made. This saves me £12.77 if I eat sushi every day, although I don’t always, because of sometimes wondering if it will make me fat. Now I have worked out how to roll it without everything turning into a squidgy mess it is actually quite nice, and I am pleased with the results.
I am having sushi and smoked haddock for dinner, washed down with chai tea and slices of cantaloupe melon. Even if I get fat it will have been worth it.
After that I met my friend in the computer for a very happy half-an-hour’s Zoom chat, in which we discussed our respective writings and pondered about how long it will take Cambridge before they decide whether or not we are sufficiently Masterful enough to be allowed to graduate. After that I was so excited and inspired, because of the writing part of the chat, not the graduation, about which frankly I am not terribly interested, I bashed out another five or six hundred words of my story and then, just as some bonus virtue, painted some more bits on my Advent calendars.
By the time it came to getting ready for work I felt awash with my own achievements, except there were a dozen little jobs I had forgotten to do, like changing lightbulbs and trying to find a house key for Jack, who comes back tonight, and I had to dash round and panic at the last minute.
The house key is for the front door because he parks his car at the front, and he will get very wet if he has got to trail around to the back every time, to come in at the back door like any normal person.
It took me ages to find a key. They turned out to be in a plastic bag on a shelf next to Mark’s shed in the back yard, and the plastic bag was so old that it disintegrated when I picked it up, leaving me with a pile of keys in a puddle at my feet, but one of them, it turned out, fitted the front door, and I left it in the kitchen for him when I came out to work.
I just left the front door open.
It’s easier that way.
