Sunday 1 October 2023
October. It’s October already. It’s not quite 07:00 and sunrise isn’t for another fifteen minutes so it’s quite dark. For the first time since maybe April, I’m sitting in the kitchen with the curtains closed. I drove back to Scotland from Lewisham yesterday. It took me less than the ten hours it took me to drive down, even factoring in a service station stop and walk, stopping for coffee and a mini catch-up with my friend Sarah in Knaresborough for an hour and a half and a coffee and a wander around Penrith. The roads couldn’t have been much clearer, though it was a Saturday and I did leave shortly after 06:30.
I had a week in Lewisham after getting back from my holiday in Lanzarote and for the first time staying in London, even though I saw a few friends and my mum, I felt like I had a normal week there and I enjoyed writing, walking, shopping, pottering, tidying a bit and generally just living my normal life there. Maybe a reflection of that fact, for the first time I also didn’t want to leave the flat. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be back in Scotland, it was just that I was enjoying being in London and that home. By the time I had left Penrith and joined the M6 north to Scotland, I was excited about getting back to non-city and the house.
However, today may only be the first day in October but when I left London in September I had been wearing summer clothing, indoors and outdoors. I am today resolutely wearing a summery top but I’ve had to put a thin extra layer on and within a few hours I expect the summery top will be hidden under a warm hoodie and within a few days my winter wardrobe will be out from behind the bed. Sigh. I am not coping at all well with the thought of at least five months of being cold indoors. We do at least have heating options and awareness this year. We also have a swept chimney and we will have to embrace the multi-fuel burner this year.
As soon as I got home yesterday, I went for a walk around the garden. It was good to be back. Ah, but part of the reason I went for a walk around the garden was because our WiFI hasn’t been working since Monday. Chris has had an interesting week here. We have a SIM card in a remote router at the top of the garden. It projects to three hubs (this is unlikely to be the correct terminology), two of which are indoors. Only the outdoor one works intermittently. Failing that, there is mobile phone and data signal from up the garden, so at least until tomorrow (when an engineer is coming) we have to go up the garden to get WiFi, or hope that the outdoor one can be picked up from certain places indoors, which right now it just about is being picked up.
So now I’m going to head outdoors to check my mobile …