It has been an extremely uneventful day. Readers in search of thrilling accounts of life in the raw would be advised to look elsewhere, as I regret to disclose that today has been almost entirely without incident.
Mark’s burns have started to peel. He looks as though he has got a bad case of facial dandruff.
I am, as I’m sure you can imagine, not really being terribly sympathetic. I have made him go and brush it off in the garden, and am considering making him sleep with a towel on his pillow. Also it has made me not mind in the least that we can’t afford to go anywhere at the moment, because I think that on the whole I would very much rather that he did not visit anywhere smart and respectable with a face that looks as though it has been liberally sprinkled with dried soapflakes.
He starts work tomorrow, which is unfortunate, with any luck the worst of it will have gone by then, or he will have to take some abrasive action. Since I am not going to be with him I am not especially worried about it but have sorted out some heavy-duty moisturiser to try and glue it all back to his face if it is still looking flaky when he has got to go.
We spent most of today at work, having got up early to take Lucy to her place of gainful employment: and I baked some biscuits and did some washing in between times, which I felt counted as an achievement. The highlight of the day was undoubtedly this evening, which we decided to award to ourselves as a holiday, in lieu of Mark having a real job to go to tomorrow.
This was wonderful. Evenings at home are rare during the summer, and almost always splendid. We cooked prawns, in spiced oil for us and on the top of a pizza for Lucy: and had a glass of wine and some of that bread that you put in the oven to finish off cooking yourself, which to my mind is a marvellous invention, enabling idle people to eat fresh hot bread with absolutely no labour whatsoever.
After that we had a great deal of messing about trying to connect the computer to the screen in the living room. As regular readers will know,we don’t have television in the conventional sense, what the children refer to longingly as ‘channels’, partly because I like the marvellous one-upmanship that this absence makes possible: but we do have a DVD machine, which is one of our absolute best sources of effort-free entertainment. We don’t get round to watching it nearly as often as I would like to: and I never cease to be thrilled by the wonder of having animated stories beamed directly into my front room, where I can sit on my own comfortable sofa with the dogs on my feet, being astonished and horrified and delighted all in the space of an evening, and then forget about it and go to bed.
Tonight we had decided that we would use the Amazon thing that sends films straight to your computer, but of course didn’t want to watch on the computer, because it is in the office with uncomfortable chairs, so we spent ages plugging things in to the DVD screen and trying to behave like people who know what an HDMI should do.
In the end, to our great joy, we mastered it, and had that always lovely satisfied but mildly anxious feeling that you get when you think a computer is finally working properly but are not quite sure what it was that you did to make it happen: and there it was at our very fingertips, the fifth series of a prolonged story that we have been reading and occasionally watching, called “A Game Of Thrones”. We are dying to know what happens in the end, but as far as we can tell the chap who has dreamed it up has not yet got to that bit himself yet, and so we will have to wait until he makes his mind up.
We curled up on the sofa and very contentedly watched the first episode and were so sleepy then that we had to start getting ready for bed: but it was a lovely evening, and there are lots more episodes to go, which feels a bit like it must feel to have a pension plan, the pleasing knowledge that good things await in the future.
What a happy thought.
