With us heading off to Dent in a few weeks, I did a bit of research on the village shop. Last time we were there, the opening hours were very limited. But now it seems the Dent Stores is a holiday company as well, offering bed & breakfast. That may have always been the case, but I never noticed before. There have been a lot of houses for sale in the village, holiday properties being offloaded, and it’s possible a company may have bought them along with the village shop.
The hours are noticeably different with the advertised closing time now mostly being 5:30pm. Shorter opening hours on a Sunday and half-day closing on a Wednesday. But the big thing I noticed is that they offer a holiday welcome service by which you call them, or send an email, and order a grocery pack that will be ready for collection when our holiday starts. What a brilliant idea. That means we don’t have to buy food to keep us going overnight, or we don’t have to churn a pint of milk on the long drive over so it’s cheese by the time we get there.
Yes, we do have a fridge in the campervan and, unusually, apparently, it’s a full-sized fridge. But it takes a long time to warm up – or cool down, I suppose – and usually a lot of fresh things we take have to be eaten straight away or tossed. I’ll certainly be looking into that.
I also checked the bus service, and there’s one on a Wednesday and one on a Saturday. One bus going, one bus coming back, each day. And the timing isn’t brilliant. So if we do go on the bus to the next village, where there’s also a supermarket, we may have to get a taxi back, and with a dog in tow, that might not be so easy. That means we may be spending the days gazing at the mountains and wandering around the village, where there are also 3 cafés and a couple of pubs.
Yesterday started well. We had a better night and the poet started his new, stronger course of antibiotics. I was up on time for my reading hour so, once again, I had my dirty cuppa over a book. I didn’t have much housework to do. Just fed the dog, filled one of his puzzles, put some washing through, put some washing away, put some crocks away, and washed some more crocks. I was actually at my desk 10 minutes earlier than desk time, but as I didn’t have a short story to write this week, I started today’s blog post instead.
I was already feeling quite proud of myself because yesterday’s blog post was written, illustrated and scheduled before end of play on Monday. And it posted on time too. So the next job I did was go and share it on Instagram.
The editing client came back to me saying it was okay to leave one of the jobs for now, until it comes back again from the designer. So instead of going into the republishing work, I did the proofreading on the other outstanding job of hers and got it back to her well before the end of the day. It took me a few hours, and I worked on it solidly. Once it was gone we paused for something to eat and then the dog went for his walk.
When we got back I was shattered and I didn’t feel like working at all. The proofreading job had taken it out of me as it involved a lot of concentration. So instead I went back to the reading work as I still have a lot of books to read and review and I’m hoping I can do some catching up there too.
Today the only work I’ll be doing is my own and I hope to make a good dent in the republishing. If I finish early enough, I’ll have another extra reading hour.
The poet started to feel better, so perhaps the stronger drugs on top of the ones he finished on Monday are doing the trick. Fingers crossed!
This post appears on Words Worth Writing, Medium and Patreon.
Well done. Hope the new antibiotics work.
I imagined the dog walking himself down the lane, and had to giggle.
Thank you, they seem to be…
Actually, he probably could and would just take himself off to the meadow now. He even stops at the main road and waits before we tell him to!