We were terribly, wickedly late for work, and it is a bank holiday with double time and everything.
This was because today we woke up to the awful realisation that we had hardly any time left together. Tomorrow Mark goes back to work, and then in a few days the children will be back to school and gone.
The sun was shining, and we knew that we must clean out the taxis, peg the washing on the line, feed the children, have a little sleep and go back to work.
We did not do that.
We loaded the children into the camper van, collected the lodger on the way, and went swimming.
We did this even though we knew that it would make us late for our night at work.
The lodger had enough of a hot bank holiday in a crowded restaurant and was very pleased indeed to make some not-terribly-convincing excuses, and slope off.
I felt dreadfully guilty, really, sick-makingly guilty, because of cash flow and the need to pay the mortgage and for Oliver’s flute lessons, but sometimes the longing to be together is just just too much to be ignored. The skies were cobalt-blue, the sun was baking-day hot, and we packed soft bread and blue cheeses and smoked ham for a picnic, and buzzed off.
We went up to High Dam.
High Dam is a small tarn at the top of a fell at the southern end of Windermere. It is so beautiful that it almost hurts to look at it, like being in the middle of an improbably virtuous family-suitable film produced by the Disney Studios. It is surrounded by trees, and there is a small island with a fallen pine tree that makes a good springboard for diving. There are never very many people there, because of the fifteen minutes of steep scramble that you have got to do in order to reach it, and today it was hot and still.
We took the inflatable dinghy with us, which has been stored on the garden wall since Mark’s sister evicted us from the shed last year, and which seemed to have acquired a couple of inconvenient holes in the meantime. Mark attended to them with some duct tape and a repair kit borrowed from a bicycle, which worked splendidly well on most of them, and we carried it up the fell between us.
We made a small camp by the water’s edge, in exactly the place we camped on our last swimming trip. This was so long ago that we remembered how we had had to transport a box of tiny poopies up the hill in the dinghy. We had wanted to take the dogs with us, and so the poopies had to come as well. Roger Poopy seemed to have no recollection of this, his very first exciting outing. It was not likely that he would really. Even when the poopies eventually got big enough to scramble out of the box, some weeks afterwards, mostly they managed to escape by standing on Roger Poopy’s head
Lucy was the first into the water. The lodger splashed, and was resoundingly splashed in return. Mark and Oliver launched the boat, and Mark somersaulted over the side, which I thought was jolly brave.
We chucked the dogs into the lake as well, because they smelled, but they turned out not to be lovers of swimming, and had to be rescued and then carried in the boat. Then we all swam across the lake, which was brilliant.
There is nothing nicer than swimming outdoors on a really hot day, when you have been squinting and sticky and cross for ages.The water had hardly been stirred up at all, and it was sun-warmed on the surface, and cool to the point of chill as you got deeper, with hosts of tiny fish nibbling at our toes. The sun sparkled on the water, and dragonflies skimmed across the surface, and we thought how lovely it was, to be basking in a cool lake in the warm sunshine.
The boat deflated a bit as we swam, because of the holes. This did not matter in the least, because we are all good swimmers, except the dogs, and in any case it stayed up perfectly well enough to have a good time, and could even be said to have made things more exciting.
We had our picnic, helped along by some champagne that we had been hoarding in a locker in the back of the camper van, and splashed in and out of the lake a few more times, drying out beautifully in the warm sunshine.
It was lovely to amble lazily down through the trees afterwards, feeling fresh and cool and peaceful. We sat on the deckchairs outside to drink tea, and eventually played a sort of giggly general knowledge quiz, with Lucy as quizmaster. We were all rubbish at this, sometimes we even got questions wrong when Lucy asked them a second time, but it didn’t matter because we were sleepy in the camper van, not in a pub league.
Eventually we had got to go, and get ready for work. It did not matter. The day might have been over, but I am holding the memory of it in my whole body. I am still gently warm from the sunshine, and my hair smells faintly of lake water and spring leaves.
It has been perfect.
