Well, we have become very springtime-clement, and the world is becoming lovely.
We have the beginnings of green leaves poking through, the foxgloves are beginning to spread their skirts, the birds are advertising their desirability and yelling abuse at one another, and the dogs have started jumping in the tarn again.
I saw a frog this morning, presumably making his optimistic journey down the hill to the tarn, which functions much like a nightclub for frogs, except with some horribly savage outcomes for some poor ladies. You will recall from last spring’s pages that should a poor lady frog finish up with too many over-enthusiastic boyfriends, the outcome is that they drown her, and last year there were several sad little corpses in the tarn.
It would have to be a very downmarket nightclub indeed to finish up with so many tragic corpses, even worse than the one in Bowness, which is not the most salubrious of late-night watering holes.
I am very glad I am not a frog. There are many disadvantages to human pairing, not least that one’s partner does not remember important things like putting the kettle back on top of the stove when he has used it, but so far Mark has not tried to drown me, although I suspect there might have been a few times when he has been tempted.
He comes home tomorrow. I am looking forward to this, not least because I am coming to the end of the sawn firewood, carefully stacked in the yard for me before he left, and his continued absence would mean that I would be compelled to take my taxi off to the farm and fill it with logs myself.
Since I have cleaned it this afternoon, being Sunday, I am not at all enthusiastic about such a task, and in any case I am a girl so of course it would be impossible.
I am going to stop working the very moment that he appears and be on holiday, which I hope is not going to be too early, because I have not yet cleaned the house or refilled the fridge, and so tomorrow is going to be very fully occupied until that moment. He thinks that his helicopter will be an early one, and he might even be in Aberdeen by breakfast time, and so I am going to have to get on with it. I have not even checked to see if we have got biscuits, indeed, I think that we haven’t, because of having a vague recollection that Oliver emptied the biscuit tin into his own luggage when he left last time, and so some baking efforts are going to have to be employed. I do not think Mark will take kindly to my current eating plan of a grape being a perfectly adequate mid-day snack.
I am now sitting on the taxi rank, trying to get this finished quickly so that I can continue my further perusal of the Great Boris Johnson Book Of Excuses, which is turning out to be a fascinating tome, jam-packed, as one might expect, with, well, excuses. Some of them are quite good excuses, but some are dreadful, and lead me to suspect that he was a) not very well-informed, and b) quite astoundingly easily led. Think of a dog who knows you have got a pocket full of sausages. It is a good read, however, clearly designed to pave the way for him having another go at leadership, and worth a look, although I recommend that you get it out of the library. He is not so short of ready cash that he needs you to splash out £16.99 on a copy.
Talking of book prices, I am now almost definitely decided, for all sorts of reasons, not least from a guilty awareness of my own unemployability, that I am not going to bother trying to put my latest effort to an agent or a publisher, but am going to try and sell it myself.
Obviously I know that a publisher does not exactly employ a writer, but there is a very great deal of having to do what you are told, and I am not very good at that. I have spent another hour this afternoon trying to pick my way through incomprehensible web pages that tell you all about it, and I think it sounds like an interesting challenge.
I will keep you posted.
