We have got an outbreak of gloriously warm weather.
To my enormous satisfaction, not to mention mild surprise, today has been sunny and still and humid and warm.
We started the day by wandering out into the front garden after we had had coffee, tugging out the first weeds and exclaiming at the number of caterpillars. I have never seen so many butterflies as we seem to have this year, global warming must suit them. I watched one in the garden the other day, alighting on leaves and carefully depositing an egg on the underneath of each one, and regrettably the butterflies’ cheerful abundance has become the nasturtiums’ misfortune, because they are being eaten back to pathetic green skeletons.
I am not quite sure what to do this, caterpillars are an absolute nuisance but I have a vaguely guilty feeling about squishing them, even though they have demolished the entire flower bed by the conservatory door. Also I do like to see them, I stood for a while with another dog walker at the edge of the woods this morning and we gazed in awe at the hundreds of red admirals fluttering around a purple-flowered bush whilst our dogs charged off up the road and fought one another, noisily.
Afterwards I went up through the woods and over the fell, and thought with an inward sigh that already the season is turning. The blackberry bushes are so laden with fruit that they beginning to droop over the footpaths. Most of the berries are still green, but the first ripe berries are dangling already, fattening purple in the hot, late-summer sunshine. The leaves are darkening, and a few are just beginning to show a hint of yellow, and the air was damply heavy with a rich scent of blossom and just the beginning of the acid autumn-tang.
Autumn will be upon us soon.
The dogs panted and puffed and hurled themselves into every puddle they could find. Rosie, whose legs are too short to keep her very far out of the mud, was crusted and filthy by the time we came down.
Regrettably I could not spend the whole day hanging about out of doors, much as I would have liked to. Mark was lying underneath his taxi in the alley and swearing, and I had to do some computing things, not least to try and establish what is happening with Mark’s next offshore trip. This is supposed to be departing from Aberdeen on Friday morning, meaning that he has got to leave here on Thursday, but so far the organisers have been vaguely non-committal, explaining that whilst they are ninety five percent certain that the trip will go, of course it very easily might not, and is subject to the vagaries of helicopter travel, oil-company decision making, and general organisational inadequacies. This is all very well when it will not be you who is chucking clean socks and underpants into a bag at the last minute and belting furiously up the motorway, and I have been scowling at the computer in some frustration.
We had a cup of tea after that, and I took the opportunity to discuss my current sartorial difficulty, which is that all of my clothes are too big for me. I do not usually care in the least about this, but we are going to Manchester later on this week, and I do not wish to be obliged to wear a dress which not only needs to be held up with discreetly placed string, but quite possibly has either bleach or paint smears all over the skirt.
Mark listened patiently and suggested that we popped down to Bowness to purchase a new one, so we did.
We rang an Uber, but after ten minutes’ hanging about on the doorstep the telephone said brightly that they weren’t going to turn up after all, sorry. This was infuriating, because of course we are trying to collect receipts for them doing rascally local taxi runs. They are doing so many of these that they didn’t have time to pick me up, the rotters, we passed several on our way down the hill in Mark’s taxi.
The Size Ten dresses were too big.
The one I finished up with was a Size Eight.
I haven’t been a Size Eight since I was about eight.
I was a bit nonplussed about this, because when I look in the mirror I think I look exactly the same as I always did, it is mildly surreal to think that I have shrunk. I checked in the changing room mirror especially, but could not see any difference at all, perhaps clothes sizes have just changed their measurements.
When we came back I gave Rosie a haircut, there wasn’t time to do both dogs before work, and she was the slowest to peg it when they saw the clippers coming out, because of the aforementioned short legs.
She fought hard. There was bloodshed.
The animal lovers amongst you will be relieved to hear that it was mine.
Roger Poopy’s turn tomorrow.
