Rabbit

I gave Number Two Daughter some money out of last night’s takings to go to the Co-op to buy a melon this morning and she brought it all back.

She explained that fifty pence pieces with Peter Rabbit on them were not the sort of things that you spent but the sort of things that you put on eBay and sold for twenty quid.

I didn’t believe her but she went on eBay and showed me that against all probability, indeed there are people in the world who will pay twenty pounds for a fifty pence piece.

Some basic calculations suggested that we had got about two hundred pounds worth, but Number Two Daughter put them firmly in her pocket because of course I had given them to her and then she had bought the melon with her own money.

There are lots of them about, because the Beatrix Potter Exhibition in Bowness has been giving them out as change to everybody. I have been spending them in the Co-op for days. We will have to start collecting them and by the end of the week we might be able to fix the camper van.

She went off then, weighted down with over priced money, to take the dogs for a run around High Dam whilst we went to work.

There has been a marathon run going on around Windermere today, with lots of amazingly brave exhausted-looking people puffing past the taxi rank every few minutes. A very fat man got in my taxi and said that he thought they were stupid, and I had to be very restrained not to say something very unflattering in response. I didn’t, of course, which turned out to have been a good idea, because he gave me two pounds as a tip, which he certainly wouldn’t have done if I had made disparaging remarks about his own idle portliness.

It is not a bad day at all for a run, dry and a bit breezy, certainly it has been a good day for my washing, which has dried splendidly in the garden and if only I had remembered to ask Number Two Daughter to take it in whilst we were at work we would have lots of dry washing.

I am not holding out great hopes for Number Two Daughter thinking of doing this without being told. I expect I will have to bring it all in at midnight after work and just hope it has not collected too many adventurous slugs and other horrors invisible in the dark.

I do love our lives very much, it is just about the nearest thing possible to being always on holiday that I can imagine doing. Every day I hear people in the taxi remarking sadly that they have got to go home tomorrow, and it makes me feel very pleased indeed to think that tomorrow will very probably be much like today.

Today Mark and I passed a pleasantly contented if not very profitable day sitting on the taxi rank drinking tea and speculating about the ways we could rebuild the camper van. He says that he will get on with it next week, once he has taken his car back for its MOT tomorrow and also resolved the puzzle of the black smoke which is puffing out of the back of my car. This does not look inspiring to potential customers so I have got to make sure they are looking the other way when I turn the engine on.

I suggested that I could come with him for his car MOT and we could go together and look at some new vinyl at the carpet shop just across the road. We need this to cover the walls of the camper van bathroom because we have taken the last stuff down after he bought it without proper consultation and I decided in the end that it didn’t have the right ambiance.

He did not seem very excited about this and wondered if I had got important things that needed doing at home. I assured him that I hadn’t, and so tomorrow we are going to go into Kendal together and make sure that we pick out some nice vinyl which helps build up the right sort of bathroom mood for a newly energised camper van.

Incidentally, just as a complete change of subject, I am pleased to tell you that I have solved the problem of eating too much chocolate and peanut fudge. This particular batch has been very nice indeed and I have begun to develop a very wobbly area just above my belt. Today I bought a bag of jelly babies and so didn’t eat nearly so much fudge.

So that was all right.

LATER NOTE: I am guilty of a terrible misjudgement of Number Two Daughter. When we got home the washing was neatly folded up on the beds.

It was even lovelier for being an unexpected surprise.