It is gorgeously, gloriously warm.
I have taken all of my socks off, not only the top pair, and replaced my three jumpers with a lightweight cotton shirt. I bought this to give me an extra thin layer on cold days. This is wonderful. It is amazing how much easier it is to do things without several layers of insulation enveloping me.
We got up early again, because today I had got to get Lucy. Not quite so early, because she finished later than Oliver did, but her school is an hour’s drive further away.
I had quite had enough of driving by the time I had got back. It is the Bank Holiday weekend, and just about everybody within a couple of hundred miles seemed to have hired a camper van, which they were cautiously driving towards the Lake District at a very sensibly careful speed.
It took six hours.
We phoned Mark and Oliver to come and meet us in Booths. They had been at the farm all morning, doing man things with the field drains.
They had also been doing all the other things that men do if you leave them unsupervised, like making batteries out of potatoes and putting toolboxes on the driver’s seat of the car so that Oliver can reach the pedals when Mark is not in it with him.
Mark has acquired Oliver a car of his own, somebody gave it to him and Oliver has been busily driving it up and down the field. They are both pleased with this achievement. I have not been there and so have not had to watch.
I have been discussing Man Things with them, because I have been reading a book about women’s liberation. This says that men and women should consider themselves equal in everything.
I liked this idea. My own mother tried hard to be equal but still gets in a flap if Mark gets up to make the coffee instead of me. I explained this to Mark and Oliver over dinner last night.
I was chagrined to hear Oliver collapse with really helpless laughter.
“Why do you want to be equal?” he said. “You can’t be equal. You can’t do half the things that me and Daddy can do.”
I was challenged by this, and protested, in true feminist style, that of course I could.
Oliver shook his head.
“You can’t,” he insisted. “You can’t burp the National Anthem or fart when somebody pulls your finger. You’re rubbish.”
Mark, encouraged by these revelations, reminded me of the spider on the kitchen shelf, which put the tin hat on my equal opportunities. I am going to lend the book to Lucy. I don’t think that she can burp the National Anthem either, but she might have a better go at it then me.
We went around Booths together and everybody put the things that they thought they might like to eat into the trolley. This resulted in a peculiar combination of choices, and rather a lot of crisps. Mark chose carrots, in a burst of health-consciousness, although was vague about what he thought we might do with them. He and Oliver chose pizza for dinner, which was fine, because I didn’t know at that time that they had had pizza for their lunch as well.
Lucy chose olives and sliced bread, and I had plum bread and some cheese. We completely forgot milk, and when we got home discovered that we had three different sorts of tomatoes.
It turned out to be a nice way of doing shopping, we don’t have a single dull thing, since nobody fancied soap powder for dinner. We sampled the cheeses on the cheese counter and bought unpasteurised Brie and Jarlsberg. The man on the sausage counter said that my T-shirt, which was a multicoloured psychedelic swirl of colour, chosen because I hadn’t expected to see any other parents at Lucy’s school, made him feel happy inside.
We unpacked happily, safe in the knowledge that everybody can eat things they like all week, and then celebrated with pizza in the garden before Mark and I went to work.
There are a lot of police with guns wandering around Windermere. We are all sticking very carefully to the speed limit in case they get twitchy in the heat.
The picture is Lucy’s school this morning.
She did English Literature today but not the dodgy Romeo and Juliet question, so that’s all right.
