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Most of the day spent on the banks or the water of Lake Windermere. The kids very reluctantly boarded a boat for a mini-cruise and though Ernie was reassured by the kind old fellas who constituted the crew that the boat wouldn't sink, Phoebe sulked through the whole experience. But she's 8 so that checks out. I was dragged on walks and museum trips by my parents and did nothing but mope and complain. And I was 28 years old at the time. Which is tragic, rather than comic when you think about it.
Ernie had been to the loo just before we got on the boat but was desperate to go again whilst we were still ten minutes from land. Water water everywhere, but not a place to piss. There was one stop off before we got to our destination and luckily the stop was ten minutes, so we rushed off to look for a loo. There was an aquarium and train station so I knew we'd find one, but he was getting frantic and ran across the car park shouting "wild wee" and wouldn't stop running. Luckily no cars were coming and we managed to find a loo, like Anneka Rice looking for a clue, asking the woman on the desk at the Aquarium, running through a cafe on the platform and finally getting relief. It was a close call. Both for his trousers and his life, but back in the boat he fed the ducks cornflakes and couldn't be happier. After screaming that he didn't want to go on in the first place.
Phoebe maintained her detachment throughout.
We'd lunched in the National Trust cafe where it was very hard to find anything that would make my Zoe app happy. In the end I had Cornish pasty and half a pack of crisps for a disappointing zero points. Even though I'd started the day in the 80s, I was now smashed down to the early 40s. The Zoe app is very unforgiving of transgressions. Even a dinner of fish and veg didn't really rescue me.
In the cafe Phoebe had wanted to buy a Frube-style yoghurt, but had noticed that the sell by date was written on a sticker. She peeled it off to reveal that the actual sell by date was yesterday and concluded that the cafe was trying to poison us. They were, I suppose, contravening health and safety rules and it was a great bit of sleuthing from the kid. We could have dobbed them in and got them closed down, but instead Phoebe just insisted they were murderers. It was almost so bad that she turned down the chance of an ice cream from the cafe after the boring boat ride, but a millionaire Magnum convinced her to take the chance. Bit cheeky of the cafe and a pretty bad attempt to hide the truth - at least try and forge the date with a fucking biro or something.
They paddled in the lake a little bit and then we went home. To our temporary home. The kids are a little bit home sick so it will be nice to get back the day after tomorrow.
