Bonfire night

Since we are in the middle of spring cleaning we decided that we would not go to work today, in order not to have the frustrating experience of stopping everything we were doing and rushing off in the middle of the afternoon.

I have got no idea how people who have to start work at nine manage to do it. It takes me all my time to get myself organised for three o’clock in the afternoon, and quite often I don’t manage that in time.

Anyway, today I didn’t need to worry because we had the glorious luxury of not working. We had coffee in bed and emptied the dogs and went to the shops before we started on the cleaning up activities.

We had got to buy milk and bread and all the usual things: but I had also decided that we would buy a new collar for the second-hand dog we acquired a few weeks ago.

She came with a pink leather collar covered in plastic diamonds. In itself this was not especially a problem: but it was thick and heavy, and scratchy, and looked uncomfortable, so a few weeks ago I found a lightweight soft new one on Amazon. It was only when it still hadn’t turned up over a fortnight later that I looked at the orders again and realised that I had absent-mindedly ordered it from China, and it was going to take ages.

This morning I decided that enough was enough, and we bought another one from the grumpy little man in the Windermere pet shop and thought that at least it would do until the new one arrived, which of course it did in the post half an hour after we got home.

I think I must have been drinking when I ordered it, because not only had we to wait for it to turn up from China but when Mark opened it, it turned out that it was a plastic affair with red flashing lights. I discovered this when I found him helpless with laughter in the kitchen and the dog rushing off in horror to the bottom of the garden.

Of course the dog wouldn’t have anything to do with it, no matter what we did, and in the end we put it in the dustbin, and Mark reminded me again of the folly of combining internet shopping with drinking.

Mea culpa. Must drink less.

After that we got on with the spring cleaning again. We rearranged things and polished and cleaned windows with nice lemon stuff until the house started to feel a bit better and began to smell of beeswax and lavender and pine instead of dogs and small boys, and since we were in the mood for spring cleaning, after dinner we all loaded into the car and went up to see Mark’s sister and her husband at the farm.

Mark does most of his car and camper van repairs at the farm, there is an enormous shed there big enough to park the camper van and also a couple of Jumbo jets if we had any, which we haven’t. In fact all the space in it that was not occupied by camper van was full of an enormous accumulation of junk, and the purpose of our outing was to have a spring clean there as well.

We brought the children along to lend a hand, but they disappeared with their cousins within the first five minutes of our arrival, and left the four of us to it.

I don’t think I have ever seen such a collection of astonishing rubbish anywhere.

There were the contents of a barn and cottage once sold from the farm estate, and abandoned furniture from the farm itself; and old farm implements including decaying horse harness and a complete, but utterly rotted, horse-drawn cart. It has all lurked there for years, ancient and mouldering and occupying a huge amount of space, and we had all considered that it would be a very good thing to have less rubbish and more space.

We spent the evening having the most enormous bonfire.

We hauled horrible, filthy, mite-infested furniture down and threw it all in a dumper truck and tipped it on the fire. It seemed to be never ending: ugly, squat Victorian monsters, crumbling dressing tables and butter churns and dusty hay and hideous, heavy sideboards. We tugged it free of cobwebs of baler twine and disintegrating plastic sacks and a couple of putrefying rat corpses, and hurled it all in to the flames.

It was the most glorious feeling, spring cleaning on a massive scale, atavistic and sacrificial and celebratory all at once. We laughed and sweated and banged our knees and elbows and coughed in the dust: and at midnight the flames were still huge, but it was done.

We have got a splendidly clean and tidy space, and Mark can work there and his sister can store her logs there, and Oliver and his cousin can practise their shooting there.

If anybody else is considering a bit of spring cleaning I can wholeheartedly recommend a good bonfire.

We have got plenty of good potash that we can put on the allotment as well.