The day did not get off to the most auspicious start.
This was because it started far too soon after yesterday concluded, about two hours, actually.
I had an appointment this morning at nine thirty. We didn’t get to bed until almost six, and Mark decided, correctly, that we had better set the alarm early enough to give us time for some coffee first.
The dogs did not believe that we were serious about getting up and refused to budge. We steamed our eyes open with rich chewy coffee, and set off for Bowness in the pouring rain.
The appointment was with a sports therapist.
A sports therapist is not somebody who helps you realise why you have an instinctive aversion to all sorts of sport. This particular sports therapist was somebody who had been recommended to us as being very good for trapped nerves and bad backs.
Obviously we both went, neither of us is going to be left out if something interesting is happening to the other one. Mark sat in an armchair and watched with amused interest as I stripped down to my underwear and the therapist lady pointed out that my back has an unnatural kink in it and that half of my bottom is lower than the other half.
Oh, the indignity of getting older.
After that I had to lie on a table with my head in a hole whilst she covered me with hot towels and prodded and poked at bits of me.
The hot towels were nice.
In the end she made me wag my legs about from side to side and told me that I had to think holistic thoughts, and that if I followed a regime of careful relaxing I would make every bone in my body feel better.
This is the sort of advice I am always happy to hear, vastly preferable to the sort you get from guilt merchants who bang on about exercise and stretching and losing a bit of weight.
I felt pleasantly relaxed afterwards but it was the sort of relaxed that doesn’t make your trapped nerve feel any better at all. I took some drugs for that, and they helped.
By the time we got home Lucy had buzzed off to start her new career as a florist, so we went to the farm.
The day progressed very nicely apart from a terrible misfortune when I accidentally dropped my best paintbrush off the wobbly scaffolding and the dogs ate it.
I was dreadfully upset. It is my fine paintbrush, the one that I use for the tiny detailed bits.
We hunted around the workshop floor until we found the brush end, which was fortunately untouched, and Mark repaired it with some super glue and a bit of initiative.
The results are above.
When we got home we went back to bed for a couple of hours. The problem with doing this is that you then have two occasions in the day when you have got to get up without having had anywhere near enough sleep, and we were bleary-eyed and staggering for a second time.
Lucy was home by then, and we listened to her stories of her adventures. It turns out that she enjoys being a florist so far. She has been out doing deliveries to hotels and putting together bouquets and making little vases of flowers to go on tables, and she helped a man who had forgotten his wedding anniversary spell the card right.
She thinks that it might be more fun than tipping rice over restaurant customers, because nobody is drunk and she likes the idea of working during the day. Nobody in our family does this, and it had not really occurred to her as a possible pattern for a working life, she was quite charmed by the novelty of the idea.
She went off upstairs to enjoy the luxury of an unoccupied evening, and we went back to the farm, where we had invited ourselves to dinner with Mark’s sister and her family.
She is a jolly good cook, and dinner turned out to be both splendid and plentiful, with a large rice pudding at the end, served with custard. Mark was especially pleased indeed at this turn of events, and ate a great deal, and we sat back at the end with a splendid feeling of being contentedly stuffed, and drank large mugs of tea to round it all off.
It was a busy day.
I am going to go back to bed now. It would be for the third time today, except it is now tomorrow.
