This is the first of several short entries due to yet another holiday weekend, hurrah for gainful employment.
We have divided the day between gardening and sleep in readiness for the Bank Holiday which is hurtling towards us like a lorry towards an unexpected cyclist on the M6.
Other than for its obvious pecuniary advantages we are not greatly looking forward to the weekend. It is always a bit difficult when several million extra people turn up to a place all at once.
The Lake District will be full of lost and cautious motorists. The petrol station will run out of diesel. The Co-op will have a queue to the door of people who have come to stay in a holiday cottage and forgotten to bring coffee, but who can’t now find Waitrose’ own brand. The cafés and hotels will be so full that on Monday night the nightclub will be packed with exhausted cross table-waiting staff, and the taxi rank will be full of people who think that behind the reversing taxi will be the perfect place to stand to take a photograph of the Chinese restaurant.
On the whole I like tourists. They are having a nice time and are far more charming than our normal client base of end-of-shift kitchen porters, and they spend more. They are friendly and enthusiastic and remember taxi drivers from the last time they came here on holiday three years ago and wonder why they don’t have a proper job yet.
We are going to be busy, especially if the weather is good. Today we had a morning of pottering about the garden and other generally relaxing activities, in preparation for the next few days, which will be entirely occupied sitting behind the steering wheel. This is not a bad way to earn a living. It is indoors without heavy lifting, and there’s is plenty of opportunity to read.
We ambled about pegging washing out and planting things into hanging baskets until it was lunchtime, at which point we went back to bed. We can do this without difficulty now the children have gone, and if we were ten years younger might do it more often, but as it was we collapsed with the effort of mixing potting compost and went instantly to sleep until it was time to go to work.
Mark’s computer charger has broken. We have ordered a new one, but until it arrives he is without electronic distraction on the taxi rank, and so has reverted to writing a gardening diary. He is now meticulously recording dates and varieties and weather conditions, so we are now a two-diarist family. I had to point out to him that it was April, not May, because it turned out that he has not been paying much attention to the passage of time, but that is because I am an experienced diarist nd he is only a beginner.
His diary also has pictures, mostly careful plans of the allotment including heights and gradients and other fascinating details. I am very impressed and resolved to include more information in these pages that I might one day find useful.
How very literary we have become.
