Mark was surprised to hear during our coffee-in-bed-and-discussion this morning that I have booked the two of us to be naked models for a young and in-training photographer friend.
He wasn’t particularly resistant, just surprised, mostly because he would not have considered the two of us in our fifty year old splendour to be the sort of image that anybody would wish to capture and then display, except possibly to illustrate a medical textbook depicting the consequences of over indulgence.
However, one of the things I have always loved about Mark is that he never says no to anything at all, and he laughed and suggested that we get the finished product made into a Christmas card in order to surprise people. So we are going to be undressed nicely textured if somewhat sagging and wrinkly models in a few weeks, which I think will be great fun, and even if it isn’t I don’t want to die until I have done everything, and of course it is perfectly possible that I might look better in a photograph than I do in a mirror.
Also our photographer friend might be famous one day and then we can hang his picture of us on the wall and be insufferably pleased with ourselves. Mark said that if we are going to get naked photographs done than we will need haircuts first, which I thought was rather sweet. Personally when I look at photographs of naked people I never notice if they need haircuts.
This all added some interest to our morning coffee, which doesn’t usually get much more thrilling than discussions of what needs to be put in the washing machine and what time we will reluctantly drag ourselves off to work. Of course we talked about those things as well, and I put the sheets into the washing machine when we finally got up, because we are still having our beautiful Indian summer, and Mark took the dogs off to the farm.
It was lovely to get on without the dogs under my feet. Mark finished their haircuts yesterday and they have been complaining about being cold ever since. When I woke up this morning they had both crawled into the hollow in the quilt between us in bed and were curled up tightly and pressed as closely to us as they could manage, which was friendly but a bit squashed.
I put the sheets back in the bed once they had dried on the line, they were warm and smelled of mint: and then closed the bedroom door in order to make sure that nobody came home covered in farm mud and thought they might just slip un-noticed into the cosy spot underneath the quilt whilst my back was turned.
After that I spent a couple of hours sorting Elspeth’s receipts into piles and being nosy about the sort of things she bought when out shopping, and then turned my attention to a skirt that I had started to make at the beginning of the summer. Of course then the children came home, and the tourists came on their holidays, and there wasn’t any time for peaceably pottering about doing creative things, so it was stuffed in the cupboard under the desk, where it has lain ignored and crumpled ever since.
I dug it out with some pleasure to day, and I had almost finished it when I tried it on again, when I discovered to my irritation that I have either made some sort of mistake with the measurements, which would not be unlikely, or lost some weight since the beginning of the summer, because it is too big around the waist by about three inches, and dangles unbeautifully from my hips, which is a nuisance.
I considered this for a while, and was undecided whether I should leave it as it was, in case I get fatter again, and just buy a belt to hold it up in the meantime, or whether to take it apart and remake the waistband. I have already got to unpick one or two bits where I have accidentally messed it up, and stood pondering the difficulty for so long that before I had reached a decision it was time to go to work.
When I told Mark about it on the taxi rank later he thought that it was unlikely that I had lost weight, since all my trousers still fit me. He suggested that perhaps the dressmaker’s dummy had put some weight on due to doing nothing for such a long time, and then laughed.
We thought about the rest of the week then, and have decided to take the camper van to Blackpool after work tonight if we make enough money to put fuel in it. My father is having a few days there whilst my mother is on some kind of a jolly with her friends, and so we thought that we might go and visit him for the day, and are suddenly very excited.
We will be off as soon as we have finished work.
What an ace adventure life is.
