We slept, and slept, and slept.
Despite being in bed long before midnight last night, we woke up to realise with horror that it was not morning, but lunchtime.
We made coffee and woke the children up. Actually, apart from the guilt, it was a lovely feeling, to be unexpectedly wide awake and entirely cheerful: and it was lovely to sit in bed and contemplate the world knowing that a new year lies ahead.
We are feeling very excited about the new year at the moment. Not the actual night, obviously, which will be full of other people having parties and then complaining drunkenly about having to pay our very extortionate taxi rates to get home. This will not worry us in the least, as I can perfectly well see – although I am indifferent to – the argument that seven pounds a mile is somewhat on the costly side.
The counter argument, which we will deploy, of course, is that the impoverished can always walk if they have misfortunately spent all of their money in the pub. Nevertheless spending the evening squabbling with indignant would-be customers does not exactly summon up a celebratory party spirit, at least not until the moment when we arrive back home and count the take, at which moment our celebrations are usually heartfelt and joyful.
We planned to work today, because Monday is busy and also we have spent all of our cash, but not until tonight, which gave us the whole day to occupy ourselves productively.
It was fine, in a damply grey sort of way, and we decided that it would be a perfect moment to have our postponed Boxing Day Walk, so once we had had coffee and breakfast we ignored the anguished complaints and compelled the children to get dressed. After a lot of going back up the stairs for forgotten socks, and hunting through the coat cupboard for lost jackets, we put on our stout boots and collected a pocket full of sausages to bribe the dogs, and sweets to bribe the children, and set off.
Deciding on a destination was not easy. I wanted to go somewhere with minimum uphill, and Lucy wanted to go somewhere that wasn’t muddy, and Oliver wanted to go to Harry’s house to look at his new gaming computer. In the end we took the tried and tested option of heading over the knott to the farm in the vague hope of mince pies as an inspiration to keep on plodding even on the uphill bits.
Of course we had an ace time. The dogs charged about barking at the wind and skidding happily through muddy puddles. It turned out that Oliver was the fittest of all of us, running off up to distant hilltops and turning round to jump up and down and wave triumphantly from the top before rushing back down again to say breathlessly: “Was I fast?”
We crossed the little stone bridge over the beck and skirted around great patches of dark mud, and looked at trees bare against the sky, and climbed to a rocky summit from which we thought we could see the whole world.
In the end we made so many interesting detours and diversions that we did not go to the farm, because it was fast going dark, on account of the not-terribly-early start, and a glorious pink and purple sunset was just beginning to colour the sky. We splashed happily back down the fell side, talking about the year we have had, and the things we might do next. On the way past the park we made a detour to Harry’s house and collected Harry, to Oliver’s joy: and when we got back we carried the dogs straight up the stairs to the bath.
Lucy helped bath them, although my flat Northern pronunciation of the word ‘bath’ makes her laugh and do unflattering imitations, and in any case she was insistent that we needed to bathe, rather than bath, the dogs, and added that we needed to ‘coom oopstairs’, and then laughed so much she could hardly speak.
We needed to clean the bath when we had finished, it was muddy and unspeakable.
It was a perfect Boxing Day walk, just right for starting off the new year that is coming. I can feel the shift in my thinking, the transition from feeling excited about sparkly paper and fairy lights, to considering instead the things we might do on the allotments if we can overcome the initial difficulty of being rather too idle.
We have had an ace Christmas to round off 2015.
Roll on the New Year.
