I have spent the last several hours crossing out numbers and scowling.
This is because I am putting together the figures for my very clever barrister friend’s letter to our shockingly wicked mobile phone company.
We changed bank accounts halfway through the contract, and both banks kept logging me out, which did not help. I must have entered the Secret Code Do Not Share With Anybody Else about twenty times. Under the circumstances I would cheerfully have shared the code with absolutely anybody who might have been able to nod sagely and make helpful noises, but I was on my own with a calculator and its unhelpfully flat battery, and the whole thing became a bit trying.
Up until that point it had been a cheerful sort of day. The wet and windy weather has now buzzed off elsewhere, and most of the trees have been cleared up out of the roads. It appears that it is no longer just rubbish weather, but the BBC and the Met. office give it an actual name, presumably to help us imagine the weather to be of a personally malevolent nature, deliberately seeking us out and then charging after us and blowing our dustbins over. This encourages us to hide under our kitchen tables, feeling worried about it, instead of just putting raincoats on and getting on with things.
I think this is absolutely shocking. Everybody knows that it is the Weather Gods really, and they are not so much malevolent as overly endowed with humour.
I am not especially worried about the Weather Gods, having plenty of experience of their entertaining little ways, and have walked over the fell every morning as usual. Apart from being a bit blustery at times, mostly it has been perfectly all right. This morning I watched three buzzards hunting, one of them made the most splendid dive, but didn’t come up with anything, so she must have missed. There was another buzzard a bit further off, I could hear it calling but I couldn’t see it, and I stood and gawped at them for so long that the dogs got bored and went off to eat cow dung.
I noticed then all right, and yelled at them until they realised that they ought to be feeling guilty, and came back to heel.
We have occupied our rubbish-weather housebound moments by having some family discussion. We think that instead of the annual Christmas pantomime, we might like to go on holiday. This would not be this Christmas, but the one afterwards, and we thought we might like to go to Florida.
Actually, I thought we might like to go to Florida.
This is because there are lots of completely brilliant things to do there that are not the usual holiday activities of admiring unfamiliar landscapes, or being hushed and a bit secretly bored by cathedrals.
I am never exactly sure what one is supposed to do on holiday. I like to go to the theatre, and eat lots, and poke around interesting historic houses, but only in England. Theatre is incomprehensible in foreign languages, even if it is opera, and supposed to be foreign, like Mozart, which is full of splendid tunes but I never have the first idea what they are all going on about. Also I am not interested in other countries’ history.
Even Scottish history is pushing it a bit.
Hence I am inclined to feel a bit blank when I am trying to think of things to do on foreign holidays. I do not feel much inclination to amble around bazaars buying foreign pottery, which is never a patch on Royal Albert, nor do I want to spend longer than about fifteen minutes of any day sloshing around a swimming pool, even if it is exotically outdoors, and even if it has got its own hot tub.
Therefore Florida, which is basically the Blackpool of the world, appeals very much, and I messaged the children to see if they would like to join in, which of course they did.
Number Two Daughter did not. She said, firmly, that she won’t get that much time off work over the Christmas after next, and if she did have she would not want to waste it in Florida but preferred cultural activities like swimming with sharks in Mexico. We all accused her of not loving us and I told her that she would regret it if I died unexpectedly, but she seems to have rather less guilty conscience than Pinocchio before Jimmy Cricket rocked up, and stood firm, so it will just be all the rest of us.
We are going to review it and consider it next week, but it sounds like a very splendid way of spending Christmas, even if there won’t be any snow.
Of course there will be snow, it is Disneyland, and it always snows there at Christmas, even when it is hot and sunny.
We might have to start saving up.
