last day in Cumbria

So, last day in Cumbria today – I am heading down to London tomorrow morning on the train. The weather has been grotty the last few days, and today was no exception, wet, grey, drizzly, cold, etc. etc. I have been very Californian about the weather so far, however, and not actually gone outside when it gets like this except when I absolutely have to; today we ventured as far as Windermere, with the ostensible purpose of going to a shop that sells woodstoves.

The road to Windermere was quite exciting: it’s over Kirkstone Pass, between the bottom end of Lake Ullswater and Lake Windermere, and it’s a very bleak, desolate, windy, one-and-a-half lane road that would really really not be a good place to break down on, car-wise. We noticed just as we had left civilization (a.k.a. Patterdale, which is a post-office, an icecream shop, and three B&Bs) that we had pretty much no gas (nearest gas: 45 minutes behind us in Penrith or 45 minutes ahead of us in Windermere over bleak/desolate/etc Kirkstone Pass.) It was also one of those situations where if we did run out of gas, there would be absolutely no question about which one of us would be the one to stay with the car and which one would be the one to get out and start walking. (My price for walking over Kirkstone Pass in the rain and back with a can of gas was to be dinner at Sharrow so actually it would have been OK either way).

Luckily or unluckily, not sure which, we made it to a gas station in Windermere and from there to the stove shop, which was completely useless – a deserted room with about five electric pseudo fires with pseudo coals in ticky tacky shiny brass grates being sold for 1500 quid a pop, and several stacks of catalogs from which you could select your Fireplace Surround – I was tempted by the Mucha-esque “Evening Reverie” droopy lady tiles, or possibly the massive Art Nouveau wrought-iron lilies sprouting up the flue – but alas, no, we left without either a stove or even a catalog. Lunch at the Lazy Daisy (hello, doodle!) steak and Guinness pie mmmmm with fruit crumble mmmmm, then errandy bits and pieces (the last of the charity shop donations, including Mrs. Moore’s 1959 sewing machine which unbelievably was still semi-functional; post office; train station to reserve my ticket for tomorrow) and then home.

The builders have made truly astonishing progress this week: they have knocked out the old staircase and the wall next to the mudroom; they have taken out all the flagstones and dug out the entire floor of the old sitting room; they have knocked out the bricked-up window in the pantry and replaced the old window; they have knocked out the inner stones of the horrible fireplace in the old sitting room, and they have knocked out doorways between the old sitting room/pantry and the old sitting room/barn. The biggest job by far has been digging out the old sitting room floor; the floor level is now a good foot lower than it was before; it was a little bit of a shock to find out that the flagstones were sitting on nothing but cold wet mud (no wonder the carpets in that room were so full of bugs/mold/water/revoltingness and no wonder that room was so freezing cold all the time). There are a couple of enormous boulders that they still need to get out before they can pour the new concrete floor, so they are digging around them, and there is a mini moat of water around each of them. Standing water in the living room: good or bad? Discuss.

My dilemma at this point is how much of my clobber to take or leave; I was (surprise!) overly ambitious as to how much painting I was actually going to get done. I brought 4.7 blank canvases with every good intention of filling them (after all, what else is there to do in the rain in Cumbria?) but but but but but the light wasn’t right, or I was too annoyed with my mother, or I needed to pee, or there was only an hour before it would be time to go to bed anyway and so it wasn’t worth laying out my palette, cleaning brushes etc. etc. They had a program on the BBC on procrastination in the workplace today, and they were trying to argue that, while a lot of procrastination is obviously bad, a little bit is good, because some flash of genius that would help your work might actually come from spending two minutes watching a video on youtube (or whatever). I don’t think that’s quite accurate – procrastination is different from pissing time away, which is how I would classify my use of youtube etc. Procrastination is when I am sitting at the table with a cup of tea, going, hunh, I really need to do xyz and I am feeling cross with myself for not just getting up and doing it, which is a little bit different from thinking, yeah, I’m OK with wasting two minutes of my life looking at this youtube clip (although I have cut myself off facebook, and I now do delete most everything that people send me in the “cute hey check this out” category without looking at it (sorry if that offends anyone…)

There was another program on TV tonight (much as I disapprove of having bought the TV in the first place, it’s impossible not to watch if it’s on, I have to admit) on the disappearance of all the honeybees; it was really quite profoundly disturbing, and made me want to rush out and do my bit by keeping a hive in my garden, although I am such a lousy garden mother that I can’t imagine I’d be any better as a bee mother. I definitely like the idea of keeping bees, but I like the idea of lots of things and am not so good at follow-through, so perhaps I will stick to tango-dancing as my extra-curricular ambition for now and leave it at that.

new pantry window
new doorway through to barn
boulder with moat in middle of living room floor
la mama reacting to the idea that she might get out of her chair