Goodness, that wind has been chilly.
I am quite sure that you have all worked this out for yourselves, with the exception of those hailing from foreign parts. To those readers, my recommendation is that you stay there. The Lake District is not very welcoming at the moment.
Even the cows were shivering on my walk this morning. They barely even glanced up from their miserable huddle behind the stone wall near the tarn as I passed.
There were little white-topped waves on the tarn.
The wind was blowing so hard that I could barely stand up on the tops of the fells, and staggered about amateurishly, flapping my arms, whilst the dogs looked at me from a safe distance and wondered what on earth I was doing.
I was working off some of the excellent dinners of the last week, obviously.
It is nice to be home. Well, it is almost nice. Now that I am back home I am having to get on with all of the usual minor self-tortures I inflict upon myself in the privacy of my own space, like long uphill walks in dire weather, and cold showers before bed. The showers keep my circulation in a less elderly condition, and I like the way I feel afterwards, if not during the actual shower itself, and also I can’t help but feel that they are so horrible they must be really good for me.
Also there is a very, very, very lot to be done.
Our Christmas comes next week, it is not weeks and weeks away like everybody else’s. In a week and a day we will be off to Manchester for a further spell of reckless debauchery, this one in the company of lots of family and friends.
After that we will not be meeting up until after the Day Itself, and so everything needs to be wrapped and taken with us.
This is proving difficult because most of it has not been purchased yet.
How I wish I had been more organised in June. Then I could have given everybody sandals and sun-hats for Christmas instead of gloves and balaclavas.
We are still clearing up the debris from the last holiday. I have got the most enormous pile of ironing I could possibly imagine, it is all going to have to be pressed and packed again, ready for next week. Mark and I sat together cleaning shoes this afternoon. I have been bemoaning the state of my suede boots, which are not really suede but some horrid pretend stuff, which has unhelpfully begun to flake off everywhere. I do not wish to throw them away because they are very pleasantly comfortable, and in any case they are not worn out, just losing their sartorial charm. They are an object lesson in never purchasing disposable fashion. Mark buys really expensive shoes but they last for ever and ever, and still manage to look respectable even after ten years of daily wearing.
Today I thought I might try and help the poor boots recover a little, and so I have started to dye them black.
I have not finished dyeing them black because I ran out of dye, so they will have to wait to be finished until tomorrow. Probably I have run out of dye because it is all over my fingers. It should last very nicely on my boots, though, because it will not come off my fingers, and I have scrubbed and scrubbed.
We only had a very short day in any case, because last night did not finish until we crawled into bed at six this morning, and then we surprised ourselves when the alarm went off at seven. We put it on Snooze several times before we realised that we had no need whatsoever of an alarm, and could guiltlessly switch it off and carry on snoring. This was a happy moment.
In fact we were not sorry to have been woken up because we had been trying to get hold of Oliver, who has been unwell with some dreadful revolting disease that he has picked up from the children at the school where he has been teaching. Of course children are horrid poisonous creatures until you develop the antidotes, and Oliver had succumbed to the curse of all new teachers, and had been obliged to crawl miserably back into his bed.
We had been worried about him, lying helpless and sick in his cold flat, and I had told Mark that if we did not very soon hear of his safe recovery, we would take the camper van to Bath and bring him home. The camper van is the obvious vehicle for emergency sick person transport because of the beds and the washing facilities and the loo, and we had both pondered its preparation whilst we were getting ready for bed.
Fortunately it turned out to be unnecessary, because I looked at my phone after the alarm had gone off, and there was a message from him telling us that he was recovered.
We were very relieved and slept soundly afterwards, for rather too long, because by the time we emerged almost all of the day had passed.
It does not matter. Tomorrow is another day and I can get the ironing done then.
