It is getting late, and I should have started writing this ages ago, except I have been unwittingly sucked into reading long-ago diary entries.
One of the splendid things about having written a diary for ten whole years is that I have now got a record helping me to remember exactly how my life has been. Even the most trivial of details have been preserved. I had, for instance, entirely forgotten that I used to make cherry and almond shortbread, and resolved to remedy the deficiency as soon as Mark comes home.
I vaguely recall that I stopped making it because it is the most awful faff, the cherries are sticky and glue themselves irritatingly to your fingers whilst you are chopping them, but I am quite sure that I could manage it every now and again if I put my mind to it with some determination.
It was an enormous pleasure to be able to read daily stories from so long ago, and to realise how much, and yet how little, of my life has changed.
I have been reading about repairs to the camper van. I will be very glad when we can get it back on the road. It is sad to pass it every day, empty and forlorn, waiting for us not to be mending taxis, or installing children’s boilers, or dashing off to far away places without it. I am looking forward to it being repaired and warmly living once more.
I will be able to repaint some of the more exhausted paintwork as well.
I have not been reading diary entries today. Today I have been shopping. This was greatly facilitated by having woken up quite astonishingly early.
I have been having a small regime lately of trying to ensure that I am in bed by one in the morning. Of course I am aware that in the usual way of things, this would not exactly qualify as an early night However, in our nocturnal existence, it is something like you making a New Year’s resolution to tuck yourself up in bed every night, and even refrain from reading or watching secret Netflix on your laptop, by half past seven, as if you were in the first form at a boys’ prep school.
For the first few nights of this health-giving and energising practice, I slept like the dead, not waking up for nine, or even ten hours, and even then only waking up slowly and groggily when the morning light crept through the curtains.This was the week after my return from Cambridge, so I explained it to myself by telling myself I had been in a state of nervous exhaustion from all of the academical excitement.
This week things have improved. I am still sloping off from the taxi rank at around eleven, and managing to finish my end-of-day chores, like dog-emptying and washing up after my taxi picnic, not to mention the irritating New Year Resolution task of cleaning the bathroom, before leaping into bed and feeling pleased with myself at around one, and this week I have been awake before nine o’clock every single day.
This has given me a quite astonishing amount of time for doing things, although I should confess that I have still not got around to the ironing, and today I used it by dashing into Kendal and replenishing my diminishing stores of mackerel and hyacinths.
The hyacinths are lovely. They are in all three of the rooms that I use, wafting their glorious scent everywhere, and looking delicate and perfect. For some inexplicable reason the hyacinths planted in the conservatory have completely failed to emerge this year, except one which has got some spindly-looking leaves and no flower. I suspect that Lucy’s cats have dug them up as part of their bathroom habits, and so I have been buying hyacinths, along with handfuls of daffodils, as a present for myself so that I remember that somebody loves me.
I am quite sure that lots of people love me, but most of them are too broke to send me flowers.
They are making my life feel very fresh and encouraging. I have got a vase of them on the windowsill in my office, and I have been ploughing away at my story and breathing deeply in between my poor heroine’s everlasting calamities.
They have almost finished. I have resisted the temptation to shoot her for being weedy and dull, and tomorrow she should be on her way home. She is a modern sort of heroine with far too many emotions and a massively inconvenient guilty conscience, and I think she would be the most ghastly person to have to sit next to on a long train journey.
I will be very glad indeed to say my farewells to her.
Have a picture of the dogs in the very warmest place they can find.
