End times

It has been very noisy at the farm today.

The Lake District is a sort of practice track for the Air Force, a bit like a supermarket car park for a seventeen year old. They have been zooming about all day, massive noisy aeroplanes and helicopters, hurtling about blasting holes in the sky and drowning out the birds with their colossal thunderous racket.

Presumably they are polishing up their charging-about-bombing-things techniques, in case they have got to rush off to North Korea in a hurry. I imagine they are a bit worried in case they have to stop the chap there who looks incongruously like a large teddy bear from blowing up the world.

I was glad they were on our side, I thought they were a very scary noise and they were not even trying to drop bombs on me.

I haven’t been concerned about nuclear war since I was a teenager, when everybody knew that it could be stopped by growing your hair into dreadlocks, burning your bra and wearing hand-knitted rainbow sweaters. I don’t know if this is still the case, but I don’t think I fancy it much. I have spent a lot of money on my underwear and have got no intention of burning it, even in a good cause.

I would like a rainbow sweater, though, as long as it wasn’t the prickly sort, somebody was wearing one across the road from the taxi rank the other day, and I liked it very much. Chenille knit, and a couple of sizes too big, in case anybody is interested. I might knit myself one for Christmas.

I have almost finished the painting, and today I went inside to paint some of the woodwork in the van. Not paint it in an interesting way, but with B&Q Eggshell Matt. The paint is cream colour but called, for some arcane reason, Line Dried. This instantly suggests bird poo colour, to my mind, a sort of mix of white with green streaks, but in fact it has been misleadingly named, and it is quite an attractive yellowish colour.

I was very bored with this sort of painting after the first two minutes, and after the first four minutes I had managed to get the paint all over my fingers and my jumper and the carpet that covers the walls in some places. If it were a more interesting colour I wouldn’t need to bother with a rainbow sweater.

I have already had enough of uninteresting painting and am not going to give it another coat tomorrow. I am going to paint some pictures on it instead so that nobody will notice that I couldn’t be bothered to stand about for ages smearing lots of layers of bird-poo paint on woodwork.

It is terribly sad to be almost at the end of the painting. I have got one last corner left to fill, and feel bleak about it in the sort of way that you do when you have opened all of your Christmas presents and realised that none of them was a pony.

I did in fact have a pony in my youth, although not for Christmas, and still yearn for one occasionally now. It would need to be considerably bigger and I would also need someone to donate some spare time to look after it. The dogs live in the house with us, which a pony couldn’t, and it is all I can manage to do to keep them fed and reasonably exercised.

Mark has agreed that we can have horses when we are old and don’t have anything else to look after. I think this will be a lot more fun than just getting a cat like most old people do.

I jolly well hope we live to get old. I would be sad to miss the opportunity to break our hips falling off horses which we are to decrepit to ride.

Fortunately we have got the splendid chaps of the Royal Air Force busy polishing up their extermination techniques ready to protect us from perils.

They are jolly noisy, though.