It has been a misty, hushed sort of a day.
That is to say, the part of the day which has involved me has been misty and hushed, which was the bit which came after the morning. I missed that.
Everywhere seemed to be very grey, and damp, and still, a twilight sort of a day, the sort where you might expect to be walking through overgrown grass among moss-covered gravestones.
I had got too much to do to be wandering around graveyards, which in any case is not really something that people do in the normal way of events. Usually this only happens at the beginnings of scary films, or times when someone is in disgrace at home and can’t afford to go to a florist.
Instead I lit a candle in the kitchen and pottered about gently, hanging washing and getting dinners ready.
The season is changing. It is starting to feel like Hallowe’en. I don’t mean pumpkin shaped doorbells and Age Three Glow In The Dark Witch Costume from Asda. I mean the acid smell of decaying leaves and the birds fighting harder for the scarcer forage, and the dying summer chill wrapped around everything.
It was not really very cold, but the day felt so dark that I lit the fire. It has hardly been lit at all yet this autumn, but the house felt damp, and almost-winter gloomy. I put some dried oranges on the stove top to make everywhere smell nice. It felt better to have the bright glow in the house, less like the sort of day when you should whisper.
Mark had gone off to the farm with the dogs, because he has also been feeling the season, and has become terribly twitchy about filling the log shed. He had not been gone for very long when Elspeth arrived.
I heard her coming long before she bounced up the garden path. She has got a nice car with an open roof, and was playing music loudly. This instantly dissipated the sepulchral feeling of the day, a bit like inviting Tigger to perform his top three favourite songs at a requiem mass.
She bounded in with no inclination whatsoever to whisper.
I stopped cleaning the bathroom and made a jug of coffee.
We drank the coffee, and then we drank a pot of tea. She told me all about the tiresomeness of renovating her house and I told her all about the tiresomeness of having spent all my takings. We sighed about the difficulties of having hormonal daughters, and discussed the difficulties of socks being left at the back of the washing machine, and nodded in solemn agreement that life was full of challenges.
Once upon a time we used to drink gin and talk about sex.
Eventually she had got to go home, and Mark chugged up with the trailer full of logs.
This was a relief, the woodshed is starting to fill up nicely.
He unloaded and stacked it all. I did not help because of finishing off cleaning the bathroom, and also because whenever I stack logs he takes them down again at some time when he thinks I won’t notice and restacks them in his preferred log-stacking pattern. He thinks that I don’t know that he does this, but I do.
I fed the dogs and made a flask of tea for work, and then it was time to go and sit on the taxi rank.
I am reading a book about the Queen.
Apparently she met Tommy Cooper in a line up once, and he asked if he could ask her a personal question. She said that he could, but she couldn’t promise that she would answer. He asked her if she liked football. No, she confided, not really. In that case, said Tommy Cooper, can I have your Cup Final tickets?
This made me laugh. It made her laugh as well.
Hurrah for the Queen.
