It has been such an excitingly busy night that even though it is now after eleven o’clock, I have just opened my computer for the very first time to write these words.
There has been some sort of train misadventure and taxis are in high demand.
I do not work at the station, but everybody has been so desperate that I have been co-opted into it anyway, because the station drivers kept telephoning me to come and make myself useful, which I did, gratefully.
I am very glad, now, to have a few minutes peace and quiet, and have poured myself a cup of tea.
We are not in any rush to go home, which is fortunate, because I would like to write to you before I do. This is because Oliver is on his way home, and will probably not arrive until after midnight. He has been loafing about in Bath since college finished a week ago, and finally decided that he might come home this afternoon.
This sounds very splendid. Bath seems like a fashionably on-trend place to have had a holiday.
Of course the Lake District is also a good place to have a holiday, not that he will. He will be back at work tomorrow, and he will be busy. Probably it is a good thing that he has had his holiday already.
We have not had a holiday today. Mark brought a trailer filled with timber back from the farm this morning and started building the flower beds in the front garden. He has brought the bit of drainpipe and showed me how he might turn it into a cannon. This is going to be very exciting. Every home should have a cannon in the garden, it would make neighbourly disputes far more interesting.
He did not finish the flower beds in the end, because this afternoon he had to go back to the farm to finish digging out the field drain. This has needed doing for the past ten years at least, and probably longer, but his own digger has not been working, and he has not had time to fit the new hydraulic hoses that it needed. This week somebody has kindly lent him a digger, and so he had to rush off. He has dashed about frantically trying to get all of the digger jobs done that he has been unsuccessfully contemplating in the bleakly diggerless times of our recent past.
Every home should have a digger, probably as well as a cannon. They are remarkably useful, especially if you have also got misfortunately blocked drains, diggers, not cannons, obviously.
I have been digging again as well, although not, regrettably, with a digger, which would have saved a very great deal of rueful back-rubbing. I have almost finished digging out the front garden and emptying the soil into the not-quite-finished flower beds.
Once it stopped raining it was actually quite a pleasant way to occupy a day, scraping about in the sweet-smelling soil and listening to the house martens chirpily colonising next door’s attic. Regrettably the rain did not stop in time for my first pair of trousers, but the second stayed fairly dry, and I am still wearing them now, because the bits which are completely encrusted with mud are from the knees down and of course nobody can see those bits underneath the steering wheel of a taxi. I have to keep hoping that people will be able to manage their own luggage without my grubby intervention.
The front garden has been neglected for a very long time. I have been pretending that it is a bee garden in order to salve my conscience, and there were lots and lots of bees last year, all buzzing in and out of the dandelions with a determined air of purpose, hurrah for the sort of helpful climate activists who made idleness socially acceptable
This year, however, I am resolved that our house is going to look as though somebody lives in it.
We have had a positive plague of yellow loosestrife. It has invaded from next door and sent its runners tunnelling through the whole of the garden. I have dug miles and miles of it out. It had become a thick, knotted subterranean mat, dotted with the occasional choking dandelion that had somehow managed to force its way through its pale pink tentacles to gasp its way to the surface.
It had even managed to extinguish the mint.
I have rescued the last of the mint, and will be replanting it tomorrow.
I think I have dug out all of the loosestrife, although I suppose there will be occasional patches of guerrilla resistance surfacing from time to time.
I will have to be ruthless.
I have almost finished.
Another day or two should do it.
