Kirkby Lonsdale

When I first moved into this house in July 2000, I was pretty skint, mainly as a result of buying the house in the first place! At the time, though, I was working as an IT contractor, which is an overpaid profession to say the least, and within a couple of years I was able to have quite a bit of work done, including having some raised decking put in place at the same level as the kitchen and living room. (The house it on the brow of a hill and the garden is lower than the house itself.)

One of the chief pleasures of having the decking is standing out there with a coffee or, in the evening, a glass of wine and looking out over Kirkby Lonsdale and the surrounding hills. Not that the hills are visible today!

Charlie was best man at a friend's wedding in Edinburgh, yesterday, and was dropped off back at the house, this afternoon. Oddly, at the ripe old age of twenty-four, she took up smoking rollies, which, whilst obviously meeting with some knee-jerk parental disapproval, meant she was able to stand out on the deck, today, smoking in a manner that looked rather pleasurable. But I don't need another bad habit.

Perhaps if the weather had been nicer, we'd have stayed out longer but instead we loaded her stuff into the car and drove down to Manchester together. I love car journeys with the kids, especially when it's just the two of you; you get to hear about their lives in great detail. It's a pleasure I discovered almost as soon as the taxi element of being a parent started, and you get a lot of that living in a rural area! Today, we chatted about the wedding, being back in the house, her imminent placement with Cafcass, where she might move to when she starts work and so on and so forth. It was a very happy couple of hours.