Mark has spent the afternoon at the shed, where he has been doing the final dismantling of the old camper van.
He has brought home the last things for salvage, being an ancient map book and some batteries. The batteries turned out to be leaking battery acid, as I discovered via a cut on my finger, so I threw them away, but the map book will come in handy. We discovered during last week’s journeying that satellite navigation is not interested in your preferred routes, but will keep redirecting you the way it thinks that you ought to go, and ignores your frustrated protests.
Its response to any dissent seems to be Well Get Lost Then, which was what we did.
Maps are better. They do not argue.
Mark has got to get the van out now because we need the shed space. He has got to replace three gearboxes and Oliver’s engine before he goes away again in two weeks, and this means firstly that we will have a shed full of clapped out cars, and secondly that the new Camper Van Rebuild project is going to have to wait.
I am fidgeting about this, because I would like to start straight away, but of course we can’t. We have got to keep our weary taxis running if we are going to carry on with our decadent lifestyle of luxury and idleness.
Once he had gone I occupied my day getting on with everything else, the usual daily occupations of firewood and laundry and dog-emptying. It was raining, fairly thoroughly, so our walk over the fell was reasonably undisturbed by tourists, but took for ever because all the local dog-walkers were taking advantage of their absence.
I was soaked by the time I got home, having spent ages standing gassing in the rain. It annoys me very much indeed when tourists are milling about on the fells, spoiling the peace and quiet by talking to one another endlessly and loudly, but it is all right when it is me who is doing it. By the time I got home I had heard everybody’s opinions about camper van restoration and also how lovely it is not to have our tranquillity disturbed by other people’s pointless and irritating conversations.
It is very nice having Mark home. We waste the first hour of every day sitting in bed drinking coffee, which makes the world feel exactly as if I was on holiday, especially since it isMark who gets up and goes downstairs to make it. We justify this shirk to ourselves by pretending that it is when we organise our lives, and do things like telephoning scrapyards and making important decisions, but actually we just sit there and watch our neighbours, who get up earlier than we do, tootling up and down the street outside.
It is quite a handy time for making decisions as well, of course, and this weekend we decided that much as we like the new and lovely hotel where we stayed last week, at Christmas we would rather be at the Midland, which is safe and comfortable and feels like home.
This meant an awful lot of faffing about, because the Other Hotel, the Clocktower, had been booked, and it took me several hours of telephone calls and faffing about on the mighty Internet to change everything. I usually book the Midland by just calling the manager and explaining, but they are part of a horrible big chain now, and the manager can’t do personal nice things for regular customers, so I had to scowl at the computer with my calculator for a while, trying to work out which was better, the Extra Special Midweek We Take Your Cash In Any City At Any Time Deal, or the Advantage Gold Members’ Advantage Score Ten Thousand Advantage Points Advantageous Discount, and wasn’t much wiser by the time I had finished. In the end I just clicked Book Now and got the computer to fill in the details from Mark’s credit card, and that was that.
I thought wistfully that it will be lovely when we have got the van on the road, in its lap of Oriental Expressive luxuriousness, and I will hardly ever need to bother about looking hotels again.
Not for a few weeks yet.
There are some gearboxes to be got through first.
