Clout casting

I have been guilty of premature clout-casting.

Once again I have been obliged to don a woolly vest underneath my fashionable stripy long-sleeved T-shirt.

It is still sunny, but the chill has crept back into the air, unless you are actually in the sunlight itself the air is jolly cold. Going into the shade is an unpleasantly shocking cold experience.

Fortunately I like my woolly vests very much, they are a gorgeously soft cashmere and silk knit, and sit comfortably next to my skin without making me fidget. I have reinstalled my lovely warm sheepskin boots and am sitting on the taxi rank watching people, whose clothing decisions were rather more optimistic, shivering their way around between the shops and the pubs and the exceedingly cold lake, which has an especial frigidity all of its own at all times of the year anyway.

It is nice to have the sunshine, though, after the months and months of uninterrupted iron-grey skies, wonderful to be surrounded by green. Number Two Daughter, whose CRB check has still not arrived, dooming her to a further period of unemployment, threw in the towel this afternoon and buzzed off to the much warmer south, where she is going to spend a few days with Number One Daughter and her family, probably going to the gym and eating spinach.

It is getting very close to Number One Daughter’s upcoming Cross Fit competition, I am not sure I would like to be going to see her right at this moment as she does get herself in a bit of a tizzy about things. She is competing at something called Regionals, which I thought meant like the southern region, or the northern region, but it turns out it means Europe, as opposed to America or Australia.

If you win you get some money, presumably to pay for private healthcare to get your hip and knee joints replaced later. It is going to be held in Madrid and although we would quite like to go and watch her, the logistics have turned out to be completely beyond us, and so Number Two Daughter has been packed off bearing a good luck card and our crossed fingers.

So we are on our childless own again, able to potter about the garden thinking about manure without incurring youthful scorn. Once we had waved Number Two Daughter off and got our picnic ready we sloped off back to bed for a little snooze before work, and now we are on the taxi rank.

A chap with an annoyingly large pink limousine parked on the taxi rank this evening and sat there for half of the night, this was irritating because of not being able to see who was where on the rank, but entertaining in that it seemed to be full of young ladies in their underwear who every now and again got out to vomit.

The driver leaned on the fence and smoked cigarettes and chatted to Mark, completely unperturbed by the horrible things going on behind him. I thought that he was very patient and brave, although Mark said afterwards that he was a bit grumpy. I don’t really blame him for this, as I am really rude to people who are sick, it is one of my least favourite things to happen in a taxi.

We had some good news whilst sitting here, in the form of a series of somewhat intoxicated texts from Harry’s dad, who has finally bottled Chateau Windermere 2014, and got in touch excitedly saying that it was rocket fuel and had taken the varnish off his bathroom floor.

You might be aware that the story behind this happy news was that a couple of years ago, we managed to harvest sixteen pounds of grapes from our back garden grapevine. Harry’s dad is keen on rustic crafts, like woodcarving and winemaking, having ambitions to be a hippy when he retires from his sensible job as deputy head of a school in Kendal, so he took the lot home to practise his magical arts, and it sounds as though the results have been ace, and we are going to share it with him.

Some of it had blackberries added, and in the end it turns out that our share amounts to seven bottles, which is brilliantly exciting, we will be able to offer people our very own domestically produced wine, which is not at all a common event in Windermere, I can tell you.

We are going to go round to Harry’s dad’s house next week and have a collective self-congratulatory celebration, washed down by Chateau Windermere.

I can hardly wait.