Things We Like Doing

We had a lovely amble round the Library Gardens this morning.

Having an early night must have done me some good, because I wandered around in a contented haze looking at the world and thinking how very lovely it all was and how very fortunate we are.

When we got back home our own garden was looking splendid as well, just starting to come out in all the vivid colours of a child’s paintbox. I am particularly pleased with it because so much of it is food, which makes me feel very virtuous and pleased with myself: lots of herbs and strawberries and blackcurrants, and beans and the odd stray potato. The first mangetout are ready to eat, and Mark said that if I put them on a sandwich with some fennel it would be almost as good as being self sufficient. There are only three of them so far, so it would have to be a very small sandwich.

I thought happily how very much my twenty five year old self would have envied my almost fifty year old self, even if I haven’t grown enough mangetout to fill a sandwich, and even more so when Mark announced that he was going to spend our Day Of Doing Things We Feel Like Doing in tiling the kitchen.

This was really exciting, because the absence of tiles in the kitchen has been a small unhappiness for ages. Not enough of an unhappiness to make me nag him about it, but enough for me to look wistfully at the horrible wall behind the cooker occasionally and just mention in passing that my life would be perfect if only it were tiled.

We have got an enormous stack of tiles in the shed that we bought in a Bargain End Of Line Amazing Bargain Never To Be Repeated Bargain Sale once, and they have actually been brilliant, apart from taking up a lot of space in the shed for several years. We have tiled the children’s bathrooms and our bathroom and there are enough now to do the kitchen and the wall in front of the window and still have some left to argue about afterwards and which will eventually be lugged up to the farm and stored uselessly there until the children have to throw them away on my behalf after we die.

So Mark set up his tile cutting machine and set about cutting bargain tiles into interesting shapes, because he gets bored with any tiling job that he can just get over and done with quickly, and likes to make patterns on things, which is why it takes him ages to get round to it, because he has to think carefully about the nicest design for things.

The design he settled on was a honeycomb shape, with little squares between, which I liked very much. I made some encouraging noises whilst he was getting started,  just to make sure he didn’t get distracted, because I wanted the tiling doing so that after he has finished he can build a new cupboard to cover the electricity meter and a shelf over the top of the washing machine and put the new plug sockets in.

Once he had made the sort of mess in the kitchen that it is difficult to back out of I left him to it and went to get on with my chosen Thing I Felt Like Doing, which was making a new shirt out of an offcut of cream-coloured linen that I had bought for fifty pence, and which I wanted to wear for Lucy’s Speech Day next week.

I am not a gifted seamstress, and it took me all day and an awful lot of unpicking. I don’t know why the occupation is called sewing at all, it ought to be called Cutting Things Out And Sticking Pins In Your Fingers.

It turned out that the offcut was just enough, to my great satisfaction: when I had finished there wasn’t even enough left over to make a pocket, but I was very pleased with myself because although it is a trifle lopsided it fits really quite well, and now I can go and socialise with smart mummies without feeling as though anybody will have to be kindly and not notice.

Mark got lots of tiling done. He suggested helpfully that we could get some plastic stick on diamonds and paint the grout with gold paint, and then it would save us ever having to buy a table like the one I liked so much at Appleby Fair, and then withdrew the offer quickly when he realised that I thought it sounded nice.

In the end we had to stop doing things that we liked, because to our surprise the whole day had absolutely flown past, and it was time to go for a swim, which we like doing as well, and then to go to work, which we did afterwards.

The kitchen isn’t finished, so he might do some more tomorrow, which means that I can make some biscuits and a skirt as well, if we don’t work too late tonight.

It is so lovely to have a day of doing nice things. Especially if we can have another one tomorrow.

I took the picture at the top quite early in the day. In the end he tiled right up the wall and round the window as well. The one underneath is the garden. I forgot to take one of my shirt and now I am on the taxi rank so you will just have to imagine it.