Friday 3 March 2023
It’s 07:28, sunrise was at 06:59 (06:42 in Lewisham) and sunset will be 17:51 (17:43 in Lewisham). The longer days are good for the Beast from the East v2 that the news has been banging on about for weeks. This morning, we’re swapping Friday for Sunday, having a day off today, and catching a train to Glasgow. As of tomorrow, for the next few months, there are no trains between Carlisle and Glasgow – I’m sure it’s engineering works, but I don’t actually know what exactly. I’ve just Googled, it’s not easily discoverable why the line is closed but there are phases so maybe the odd through-train in April and May. But that’s three months of essentially no trains. I’ve just realised that that means we’ll have to get the rail replacement bus to Carlisle to go back to London. Annoying and just as expensive as the train and not at all conducive to catching the ‘bus-train’ instead of driving.
Anyway, that was a diversionary rant, I had no plans to rant today. I started off appreciating the daylight around the time I get up and the longer daylight hours.
Chris said he heard an owl close to the house overnight. I heard something sliding down the roof in the early hours. These are things we thought we’d find scary, but we’ve been fine with it. I’m sort of liking the mindset of just accepting you live with and around animals and birds, but I am still saying that while nothing has seemingly entered our living space.
I put up a few pictures yesterday with multi-purpose tack. I have been reminded why most people don’t have posters past teenage years/early twenties. Two have already slowly unstuck from the wall and had to be restuck, the one I can currently see (an old eye chart, ironically) is not straight and the three of them are all lumpy. I think the post-twenties thing is that you begin to care a bit more about how things look and you can’t be bothered to repeatedly restick falling posters.
I was at my desk more than usual yesterday and realised that I spend a lot of time looking out the window. It is a lovely place to work and the views from the windows are calming. And distracting. In a good way. Sort of.
I didn’t walk far, just two patrols, the second, shortly before sunset, with Chris, which was also to take photos (I’m using a camera I haven’t used for a while). On my first patrol, where I walked along the road, as I came down from the forestry track, an off-road vehicle came down and the driver stopped to check I was okay. He said he wondered if I’d broken down and needed help. I had a brief chat with him – it was him that made me think about preparing for being snowed-in as he said that for six weeks one February (that must have been the Beast from the East v1), he couldn’t get out this way to work – well, he clarified, when he saw my look of horror, that the roads were sometimes okay for driving but that the forestry tracks that he drives on, the ones the logging trucks don’t use, weren’t passable. I think he’s one of the rangers or [jobs I don’t know the names for] who look after the land and forestry around here. He knows the man we have been trying to get hold of to speak to about our water supply and said he’d ask him to call by one day. I like that people stop to check you’re okay and that they’re happy to chat. It is remote out here and I know that I do walk off-road sometimes. I like that there are people around who I am beginning to recognise and talk to.
I’m looking forward to visiting Glasgow, I haven’t been since I was eighteen and I suspect I’m unlikely to recognise anything.
On the way back from Lockerbie after Glasgow, with snow in mind, I think we will stock up on tinned tomatoes, pasta, rice and maybe some meat and fish to freeze. This is not how I shop or plan in London. I am fairly confident my rose-tinted enthusiasm for being snowed/frozen-in and having a daily Ready, Steady, Cook kind of challenge with our dried, tinned and frozen food would be short-lived if we were snowed-in for more than a day.