Back to work today.
We got up at what is by our standards the commendably early hour of half past nine, which gave us lots of time to get on with the day. Actually it gave us lots of day: because we were doing a late shift through until four in the morning. There is lots that you can achieve if you are doing it for nineteen hours.
So we did. I cooked a huge tray of sausages, some of which are still there despite Mark and Oliver and the dogs all appreciating them very much. Then I cooked several different flavours of Chinese meat and chucked it all into a massive dish with an enormous pan of egg fried rice, for everybody to help themselves to over the weekend.
I washed the all towels and tidied the kitchen and fed the children, and by the time I was ready to go to work I knew that my place in Heaven was assured.
Mark went to the farm and spent the day sawing up logs, which he brought home in his taxi. This is not a great use for a taxi and involves either some careful cleaning afterwards or only working after it has gone dark. Since it is still summer time he opted for the cleaning alternative, which he failed to extend to the living room carpet..
We are coming inexorably to the stage of the summer when we have got to start planning ahead for the winter again. The air has started to have the first, faint hints of the summer beginning to be over: the damp, earthy smell of autumn is beginning to creep in.
As you know, our house is heated by a single log burning stove, which Mark has plumbed into a central heating system. This runs all the radiators, heats the water, and dries the washing, because we have an inelegant but splendidly effective clothes rack suspended over the top of it, so winter visitors are treated to the spectacle of rows of our underwear and T-shirts slowly steaming their way back to wearability.
We like this very much, it is a way of living we learned in rural France, where they haven’t invented coal yet, and it works surprisingly well, the only drawback being that we have got to have a never-ending supply of unwanted trees, which have got to be dead and dried for at least a year before we can use them.
Fortunately Mark’s sister at the farm has got a fairly constant supply of unwanted trees at the moment, and last year we had some adventures hauling logs from a woodland miles up a fellside. The only vehicle that we have got with a tow bar happens to be the camper van, and the trailer is one which Mark built himself about twenty years ago, and which we unearthed out of a patch of nettles where it had been forgotten at the farm.
We were very broke at the time, and in the middle of heating our house on an absolute shoestring budget in order to save money for sensible things like red wine and school fees. The trailer was fine but both tyres burst on the way home due to being perished and overloaded with about six tonnes of logs: but Mark drove it back anyway since we couldn’t think of an alternative, and we built a tidy stack of logs at the farm which we have been burning ever since, there are still a few left.
Obviously a few logs are not going to be anything like enough to fill the ever gaping stove mouth during the chill winter months, and we do not have the sort of budget that will extend to purchasing any, and I like my house to be nicely warm, thank you: so this is the beginning of what will turn into a major obsession over the next few weeks.
The boiler needs to be serviced and the leak, which is the latest in a series of tiresome sooty leaks, needs to be welded up: the grate cleaned out and the stove painted. We will have to make sure that there is a stack of logs higher than Mark stretching the length of the garden, and at least the same again waiting at the farm.
Having said all that it is lovely to smell woodsmoke trickling steadily down from the chimney, and even lovelier to have hot water, which of course we don’t have in summer, when the fire is out, except for the showers, which have got electricity to them. Winter has its hardships: but it is the season of hot water for shaving and washing, and that is a great pleasure to start the day, I can promise you.
And it is coming.
