I am on my own in the camper van.
I am very contentedly, peacefully alone, apart from the two smelly dogs, but they have stopped trying to attract my attention now and have gone to sleep on the other cushion.
I went to Morrisons and bought some orange juice with bits in it. This is a special thing to drink. We never buy it usually because the children don’t like it, rejecting any drink with texture completely out of hand. I can never quite rid myself of the guilt of doing something so dreadfully unmotherly as buying something that the children don’t like, but tonight I conquered my scruples.
I have lit a couple of scented candles and poured a glass of orange juice and settled down to write to you.
Of course it is Wednesday night and Mark has gone to his GCSE Maths class.
We should have gone home and dropped me and the camper van off so that I could go to work, and Mark should have raced over here in his taxi and come straight out to work afterwards.
We should have done this, but didn’t.
We got up late.
Elspeth rang at half past ten this morning whilst we were having coffee, and I had to explain that we were still in bed. I did not need to feel guilty about such shocking idleness, because we have not had very much sleep over the weekend, and almost slept the whole clock round last night.
She said not to rush back to the Lake District because it was raining.
It was not raining in Ripon. It was cloudy and overcast, but not actually wet. Mark took the dogs for a stroll along the river whilst I tidied up and made breakfast, and afterwards we went for a walk up to the Cathedral.
This was actually the purpose of our trip to Ripon, because we needed to buy tickets for a cathedral carol concert in which Oliver’s choir is singing. We left this very late indeed last year, and almost couldn’t get seats at all, so this year we thought we would hurry up and buy them straight away.
I like Ripon Cathedral, it is dignified and majestic. We wandered around it with interest, looking at cleverly made decorative bits, and the wall plaques telling you about dead people. There was one terribly sad one, for a little boy, which went on and on about his loveliness, as though his poor parents could not bear to stop telling us about him. He was almost eleven, and they were trying very hard to make themselves believe that it was for the best because of being God’s will. I hoped so badly that they managed it, it was dreadfully upsetting to read, even though they have all been dead for hundreds of years.
I wanted to stop looking at sad things then, so we went for a little walk around Ripon, where we bought a scented candle for me and some pies for Mark. Of course it doesn’t quite work like that, because he will also smell the lovely candle, and I helped him eat the pies later. I mean that I instigated one purchase and he instigated the other, and we encouraged one another in the pleasure of coming home with something nice.
We won’t be coming home with the pies. They didn’t last past our rather late lunch.
We had our late lunch on a bleak mountain top, looking out at the clouds looming over Cumbria, and absent-mindedly watching the sheep. One of them had a sore foot, which Mark said was a fungus infection caused by everywhere being horribly wet.
We could tell that we had reached the end of Yorkshire and the beginning of Cumbria, because it turned out that Elspeth had not been making it up about the rain, and everywhere was absolutely saturated.
Every river was bursting its banks. Mares’ tail cataracts of water hurtled down stony hillsides, and plummeted into raging torrents in the valleys.
There was so much water that the roads were almost impassable in places, and as we came down the hill into Kendal there was a small row of cars which had been abandoned after disastrously unsuccessful attempts to drive through the enormous puddles.
This slowed us down considerably.
It slowed us down so much that there was no point then in trying to dash home and then dash back again, so we parked at the night school, and Mark went in to be educated whilst I popped across to Morrisons and then settled down to write to you.
We think that we will stay out again tonight since we don’t need to go home for anything. The roads are flooded and nobody will want to go anywhere, which will not make for a profitable night, and might possibly turn out to be spectacularly bad for the taxis.
Not that we need an excuse to shirk.
We will go home tomorrow.
Neither picture is of a river. They are both fields.
Welcome to the Lake District.
