I have been an extremely wet person today, as you can see from the photograph..
Once again, the Lake District is flooded because of overindulgence in precipitation. Actually flooded. Mark set off for his night time maths class tonight and had to come back again, because it was cancelled due to roads being closed all over the place.
This has been just a bit tiresome, because we have had an awful lot to do.
Yesterday Mark filled my taxi with things that needed to go to the tip. My taxi needed an MOT today, so I had to go to Kendal. We decided that I might as well go to the tip whilst I was there.
In the spirit of not going into the metropolis more often than strictly necessary, and also because I have become embarrassingly scruffy lately, I rang the hairdresser this morning and arranged a trim as well. My hair is misfortunately unruly once it gets past about an inch long, and I was beginning to resemble a bundle of kindling twigs tied up for lighting the fire.
It was raining when we woke up. You will be pleased to hear that we managed to achieve this considerably earlier than we did yesterday.
It was raining a lot.
I put on my Barbour jacket to go to the tip.
When I got there it was raining so much that little rivers were pouring down the roads and there were enormous puddles everywhere. Most of them were still shallow enough to drive through, as long as I kept to the middle of the road, but it was touch and go in places.
When I got to the tip I discovered that there was all sorts of horrible rubbish in the back of the car. There were old tyres and bits of rubber and glass bottles and several tubs of old engine oil.
The men who are usually helpful at the tip were hiding in their cabin. They waved to me, and one of them pretended to be diving into the huge puddle that surrounded the door.
I splashed around between skips, responsibly putting everything where it belonged. It was a good job that I had the tyres because it turned out that I wasn’t tall enough to reach the lid of the container where oil had to be poured, so I made myself a little elevated platform out of the tyres. I was pleased with this ingenuity, but less pleased about the amount of tyre-grime and engine oil that attached itself to me in the process.
I emptied the car and tried to clean out the back, because a taxi can fail an MOT for being dirty. I didn’t manage especially well, not least because by then I was sodden and filthy myself.
I took the car to the MOT garage and dumped it.
Then I had to walk the half mile back into Kendal to the hairdresser.
By the time I got there I was dripping, and weary, although it was raining so much that the worst of the tip-detritus had rinsed off my coat.
It was a joy to sit down and have my hair washed. I explained to the hairdresser that I would like to look middle class, and to his credit he hardly smirked at all. I thought this was jolly gallant of him given that I had staggered in looking like Worzel Gummidge in a thunderstorm,
It was difficult to tell whether I looked middle class or not, because I thought there was no point in blow-drying my hair when he had finished, because of the walk back. This proved to be a correct intuition, because by the time I got back to the MOT garage there was water dripping off every single facial protuberance, including my ears.
The car had passed, which was a happy surprise, although I noticed that the MOT examiner had generously written ‘N/A’ on the bit of the council form where it asks if the boot is clean. I chugged cautiously back to the farm to help Mark empty the shed.
The puddles were still shallow enough to drive through, but only just, and there were several cars abandoned at the edges of them.
Mark was very wet indeed. Wetter than me, because my coat had at least kept my underwear dry. Mark’s had not, and he was soaked to the skin.
We spent the rest of the daylight splashing through the little rivers of water that by now were gushing past the entrance to the shed. I built a little bridge to help me get in and out. We filled the trailer with firewood and the back of my taxi with Mark’s tools, all of which needed to come home and be stored in the shed.
We stopped when it got too dark to see any more, and by mutual agreement, thought that we would not bother trying to take the taxi and trailer home through the floods and then spend another couple of hours trying to unload firewood with a wheelbarrow in the sodden dark.
We left my taxi in the shed and went home in Mark’s taxi.
We were gritty and filthy and soaking and smelled of mud.
We had originally intended to go to work, but the roads are all closed now and the trains have stopped running.
I hope it stops soon.
