It is dark and still, and misty in the Lake District.

We have come home to find that the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is in full swing.

This makes it perfect weather for dressing up as scary ghost-like creatures, which I have not, although Mark has put his Captain Jack Sparrow hat and wig on for driving his taxi, in a gesture towards seasonal jollity. However it is completely rubbish for drying washing, the weather, obviously, not the hat.

Of course we have come home with sacks and sacks of washing. Four of us for a week including clean clothes for dinner, and towels and sheets and then the dogs’ towels from Nan and Grandad, not to mention the school uniform still left from before the holiday, and we have got a pile of crumpled smelly clothes which eclipses the light from the French windows.

I have done four loads so far, and I think I have got seven left to go. This is all a bit troubling, because Lucy goes back to school tomorrow and is complaining about wanting her clothes to take with her.

The thing is that I can get things clean but not dry.

Dry is the big problem. Mark lit the fire last night, but all that has happened is a sort of indoor tropical jungle. It is hot and there are steaming pairs of jeans hanging everywhere, dangling from the drying rack like something you might expect Tarzan to leap out of and swing across to the kitchen.

There are wet things on the banisters, on all the radiators and draped over the backs of the chairs. Our own bath towels have been taken off the towel rails and dumped on our bed, because they are reasonably dryish. Their places have been taken by dozens and dozens of unmatched socks, all of whom have undergone an unexpected crisis in their normally rigorously monogamous existence. Their mates are scattered all over the place, some not even washed yet, not at all considerately hung up in their habitual comradely pairs, toes together, ready to be folded around one another and tucked back into the drawer.

There is so much gently steaming washing that Mark said that if we let the fire go out it would probably rain in the loft. He has brought the big rotary iron down, because I want to try and make most of it flat before the children take it all back to school and crease it again by stuffing it haphazardly into their drawers, and it will take too long to do it all with the small iron.

I like the big iron, it is soothing to spray everything with lavender water or cologne and ease it between the rollers so that it comes out scented and crisp, it is a lovely thing to do to sheets if you have got the time, which I haven’t mostly, and hence the iron has been stored in the loft for absolutely ages, because I am sorry to say that I have just been ironing shirts, which you have got to do, and similar unavoidable things which the rotary iron is not good at.

It is brilliant for T-shirts, though, you post them slowly through and they come out nicely flat to be folded up. I haven’t had time to do anything with it today, because we got up late and by the time I had finished washing things and feeding people it was time to go to work, so it is tomorrow’s job, if anything is dry enough by then.

We dashed off to work as soon as we could, because it is Saturday, and Hallowe’en, and also because we have a rather pressing need to raise cash now, and so I am on the taxi rank.

I have just taken a rather inebriated Spider-Man back to his guest house, with occasional stops for him to be unwell into the hedges. His girlfriend asked me if I would be scared, driving back on my own, which was such a surprising idea that I thought I had misheard. I have watched somebody come out of their hotel wearing their pyjamas and slippers to get something out of their car in the car park across the road, and I have taken an earnest young man home who explained his life-philosophy to me, which was quite sweet, as are most ideas seriously entertained by the under-twenty fives. I have taken a horrible rude man and his friends home, so I charged him all the extras on the meter and then courteously gave him the taxi number so that he could phone the council to complain and be told that I can do that if I like: unfortunately he will have forgotten by Monday but it would be nice if he did. I took a boy home so that his parents could spend the night out in the pub without him, they felt guilty but he couldn’t wait to get away.

I have listened to the radio and read my book and written to you, and it has been a very pleasant evening.

I can start to look forward to Christmas now.