Soap

Matron sent me an e-mail this morning telling me not to worry, and promising that she would help Oliver learn to tie his laces properly.

She will do a splendid job of this, because she is brisk and lovely and efficient and sensible. I am pleased and relieved and feel better about life, hurrah for education, it is a marvellous thing.

We have been childless for two whole days now, and already I am beginning to get pleasantly used to it.

As you are aware, we have recently reorganised our lives in order not to have to get out of bed in the mornings and take other people’s children to school, so we had a lie in and a fairly leisurely start to the day. I like mornings very much, there is something truly wonderful about being around when the day is being made, and the sky is changing from grey to pink to gold and everything is crystal fresh and clean and splendid.

The thing is, like all good things, they should not be overdone and are best kept as an occasional treat. Eleven is a good time to start the day, when everybody else has got over the shock and calmed down a bit, and when we can sit in bed and drink coffee and watch truly interesting things happening outside our window, like our neighbours trying to fix gutters from wobbly ladders, or the postman trying to avoid the dog in the house opposite, or the builder who has bought a house across the road struggling up the path with a wheelbarrow full of tins of cheap magnolia paint.

If you get up too early none of that is happening and all that you have got to look at is the staff from the Co-op trying to smoke a cigarette and eat their breakfast whilst they are trying to reverse park their car in the dark.

Today was a happy compromise, because we got up at about half past nine. This is a good time, because it means that we can take the dogs out without worrying about Windermere’s rush hour, and because there is still an awful lot of day still ahead of us to get on with things.

It is nice not to have to make several breakfasts.

It is nice not to have much washing.

We emptied the dogs and then thought about what we would do with the enormous amount of day ahead.

Since we have reorganised our lives we have created a timetable for ourselves in order to prevent disagreements about how long we are allowed to spend loafing about or making hydrogen engines in the shed. We have agreed to work long shifts on some days and just very short ones on others. In this way we will know for certain that we are not being irresponsibly idle, which is always a lurking danger, and also it is unlikely that we will fail to make enough money to satisfy my extremely extravagant tastes.

Today’s pre-arranged shift in taxis was from early afternoon until the nightclubs close in the early hours on the morning. This sounds like a very long shift indeed, and it is, but we are busy on a Friday, and in any case we break it up by going for a swim and taking the dogs out in the middle. Also it is important to remember that driving a taxi is not hard work, and that mostly we are sitting having tea and biscuits and writing online diaries in the taxi rank.

At the moment we are spending our spare time on the taxi rank finding out how you make soap. It irritates Mark a lot to have something in the house that he doesn’t understand, especially when, as in my case, the soap in question costs twenty pounds a bar and has usually got to be a birthday present.

He has decided that making soap is an important thing that we must do for ourselves, partly because we are broke at the moment, and this morning he went into the garden to cut back all the lavender and mint in order that we could dry it all and use it to manufacture the oils. We have also grown sage and chives and fennel and coriander, but I don’t think they would make very nice soap and I would smell unpleasantly like Christmas dinner.

I am withholding judgement until I have tried it. My preferred soap is called Chanel Number Five. Mark’s home made soap will be lavender and spearmint added to some coconut oil that we bought from a very nice farmer in India once when we were younger and not paying school fees, and have never used, because it set and we couldn’t get it out of the bottle: and it is going to have to be pretty amazing soap for me to be beside myself with happiness at our creativity and independent mindedness.

So I had a friend over for coffee, and made biscuits, and Mark pottered around doing soap things, and we occupied a very pleasant morning.

After that we went to work and sat in the sunshine drinking tea.

Happy days.