Mark had the inspired idea of turning the taxi engines on ten minutes before we went out to work this afternoon, which meant that our cars were pleasingly warm when we got into them.
I was jolly glad about this, it has become pretty cold. It was minus four last night when we took the dogs for their end-of-night emptying around the Library Gardens before bed, and the frost was still there, thick and impenetrable, when we were getting ready for work today.
I think this is brilliantly exciting, and am hoping with everything crossed for a properly hard Russian Steppes sort of winter, the sort where you need to wear a furry hat which gets covered in snowflakes when you go outside to put the chains on the car tyres. A winter which is just sodden and muddy-brown is always a disappointment.
At the moment things are looking promising. The gritting lorries are belting around at great speed, flinging salt all over the place, it is one of the things that Cumbria seems to do really well. This is reassuring in the freezing black of the small hours of the morning when the chill clutches everything and I am hurtling between jobs, dreading that might make a terrible slide into some remote ditch where I will perish undiscovered and grimly alone.
Please don’t worry too much. In many years of driving a taxi I have not done this so far.
We got up late this morning, and it would have been quite a bit later had it not been for Roger Poopy being urgently in need of a visit to the garden. He had had a misfortune whilst we were at work last night, and I almost stood in it, so I told him that he was a wicked failure and that nobody would ever love him again if he did not become a better poopy. He must have been paying careful attention because he was very keen to try harder this morning.
I like the little snapshot of time that we have between getting up and going to work on Saturdays. Mark is home, and we can be in the kitchen together, companionable and contented and getting on with our own things. We had a pot of spicy chai, and once we had done the normal house jobs like hanging up washing and bringing in logs we still had an hour before we had to go.
This was a lovely thing. I mixed some chocolate and made a start on the first of the Christmas sweets whilst Mark sat at the table and made me some more printing stamps for me to make Christmas cards.
Of course I got chocolate absolutely everywhere. The thing about making chocolates is that you have got to get everything to the right consistency, too runny and it splodges all over the place, too dry and you can’t do anything with it.
I splodged it all over the place, until eventually it dried up and clung in lumps to everything I was trying to do and I had to give up and hand the bowl over to Mark to be cleaned out. We were a bit late for work anyway then, because we had tried to do too much in the bit of time that we had, and we were still putting things away when the clock struck.
It didn’t matter about being late because it was very quiet anyway. It is so very nice to be so close to Christmas, and I had a peaceful drive through Windermere in the evening twilight. The shop windows are glowing with a host of coloured lights, the trees are decorated, and all the lights from the boats and the hotels are reflected in the still black lake.
I couldn’t think of a nicer place to be.
