Mark arrived home late last night a couple of hours after the start of the rain.
As I am sure you will have noticed by now, we are having some exciting weather experiences already, and the forecast does not hint at any improvement in the near future, and parts of the Lake District are flooded already. Probably do not come here on holiday tomorrow.
This made for an adventurous walk this morning. Everything was very wet, the becks were burbling as if they were auditioning for a part in a Wordsworth poem, and there was a very, very lot of mud.
I was wearing my raincoat and shorts, in order not to soak my trousers, and I was sodden when I got home. Despite that, it was somehow a very pleasant walk. I have been freed from all taxi-related anxiety, apart from how to get the wretched radio to work properly, and I am newly freed from anxiety. Hence it was lovely just to stroll along, humming to myself and gazing contentedly at the carpet of fallen leaves and the rusted bracken, thinking how very happy I was just to be alive and milling about the Lake District, even if it was fast becoming the Very-Lot-Of-Lakes-District.
I was not surprised to find that there was nobody else out at all. My solitude was peaceful and all-encompassing. Even the birds had decided to belt up and slope off out of the way, wherever birds go when the sky is leaking like somebody’s neglected kitchen plumbing.
In fact solitude had been something of a theme for the last day or so. I had a very peaceful night at work last night. It was dark and wet, so nobody was looking very closely. None of the other taxi drivers recognised my new taxi, and so I was as thoroughly shunned as if I was some rascally interloper from Preston. Nobody waved or wanted to wind down the windows and chat, even before the rain started. This was actually rather splendid. I managed to write to you, read pages and pages of my book, and chat for hours on the telephone to Elspeth. I like talking to taxi drivers, they are the only people who can really be expected to mirror my cynicism about the public at large, but it was nice to have some time to do useful things.
I gave up when Mark called to say he was coming into the village, having driven south with the rain all the way from his oil rig, and of course it was lovely to see him, even though he is only home for a week. He has been promoted to being a foreman. It is not called Foreman on an oil rig, but some instantly forgettable sequence of letters, PDQ or OBE or LOL, or something. He will be given his own work computer and a pay rise, and will be managing a team of six blokes. I am pleased about this because of the pay rise, and because I think it is high time the oil industry appreciated his brilliance, he has been in the job for a year now, it is about time somebody noticed and made him Chief Executive.
He has done his laundry whilst I was out with the dogs this morning, absent-mindedly forgetting about all of the other laundry lying on the floor in front of the washing machine, and is now, to my massive relief, busily fixing the terrible leak in our own neglected kitchen plumbing which had led to the power cut.
It is a plumbing fitting hidden deeply into a darkly spidery cavity, behind the washing machine and some insulation and an expansion tank. It must have been leaking for ages, because the floor is soaked. We had not noticed this because our kitchen floor is a false floor, built several inches up above the real floor, but we had noticed that some of the boards were beginning to curl and lift in places, and had wondered, with the greatest of puzzlement, why this was.
We know now. It has not done the living room carpet any favours either, and probably accounts for the damp patch against the far wall.
When we make our first fortune we will have a new floor, and so we are sanguine about it. We have managed to live with it perfectly well until now, and it is going to improve from today onwards, so there is no hurry.
It is fixed.
How splendid to have a husband at home.
