We have started the lengthy process of getting ready to go on holiday.
Mark is still taking the camper to bits, actually it has fallen to bits really and he is just knocking the crumbled bits onto the ground.
We have known for some time that the little bedroom bit over the top of the cab is leaking, and he has very bravely dismantled it to see why. That isn’t really true either, because we knew perfectly well why. It was leaking because the cab has gone rusty, and leaked, and then the elderly timber which props up the outer shell has slowly become damp, and then black, and then disintegrated.
In fact it hadn’t actually disintegrated, because there was nowhere for it to disintegrate to, until Mark opened it all up, and then it all fell apart in the daylight like a relic from the Marie Rose.
Of course he will make it all all right again, he has already done one whole side of the van, a couple of years ago, one winter at my parents’ house. It is almost forty years old now, and I like to think of it as a classic vehicle, although nobody else ever does. If we park it in front of somebody’s house for any length of time they do seem to become offensive about it and almost always leave a note on the windscreen suggesting the scrapyard as a more appropriate venue for leaving it.
At the moment the restoration project is being mildly impeded by the not terribly efficient economic arrangements we have got in place in our lives at the moment. We are making a frantic attempt to pay everything in advance that we would normally pay during the week when we will be on holiday.
This is occupying most of our spare cash and so slowing progress. I am writing this on the taxi rank at the moment, and the master plan is that we will stay here until we have earned enough cash to buy four tubes of glue and some screws. So far I think we are on three tubes of glue.
I have never been terribly good at long distance planning, and have organised my finances like this for most of my adult life. We might need bread and milk as well, but they can probably wait until after tomorrow night, unless somebody gets in and wants to go to Kendal or something.
Part of the reason for today’s cash flow crisis is that I have been shopping in Asda this week and am slowly cooking lots of things, some of which I will freeze to take on holiday, but most of which will probably be eaten by Numbers One and Two Daughters and Ritalin Boy when they turn up at weekend.
Number One Daughter does fitness things, and doesn’t eat wheat, apples, nuts, fat or anything which is bad for you, which actually writes out our entire diet, given that we eat everything except vegetables. I don’t have a problem with vegetables, but it is hard to make them taste nice on sandwiches, so mostly I don’t bother, which doesn’t seem to have done us much harm so far.
I have got to think of things to feed them on for the weekend, so far I have thought of mayonnaise. Also I thought that I might make some Chinese rice and today Number Two Daughter has been helping put things to marinate in different flavour sauces.
We have emptied everything out of the camper whilst it gets mended, and so at the moment we are eating everything that we have unearthed that is now out of date. This does not seem to be having any adverse effects either, although Mark threw away some cornflakes that appeared to have passed their sell by date in 2011, although I suppose I could have made cornflake cakes with them if I had thought of it in time.
My job for the week is getting all of this stuff organised. I have refilled spice jars and rice tubs, and replaced things like pesto and biscuits, and we have thrown away – with some agonising – a pair of salt and pepper pots known forever in the house as the Bottomsex Elephants, which sometimes leaked salt and pepper everywhere, and sometimes sucked up water out of the air to turn the contents into a brick solid lump which had to be chipped out by Mark with the end of a teaspoon. I am sad to see them go but they were rubbish.
I am not sad to go. In between literary endeavours I have earned glue money and enough for milk and screws as well.
Home beckons.
See you tomorrow.
