We discovered this morning that my taxi was having tyre issues, which might have been why it was sliding about a bit in the wet.
Mark said that it could not be ignored and that before I went to work in it again he would take it to Lancaster and get some new ones fitted: which he did. This has subsequently been very irritating indeed, because although the taxi seems to stop nicely now, which it hasn’t been doing, leading to some exciting surprises, he has changed the station on the radio and hidden my glasses.
Whilst he was out I played happily with the new caustic soda we have got for making soap, and cleaned our flask out and put some down the drain for Lucy’s shower, which keeps blocking up. This was rather satisfying, caustic soda is a magical substance that fizzes and gets hot and got rid of the tea stains in the flask wonderfully, it is just like new. After that I did some organised things, like paying bills and reading the electricity meter, we have overpaid by £4.29 but I think I will probably not bother asking for it back just at the moment, maybe when things get a bit more desperate.
After a while I noticed that the house was not quite as warm as it usually was, and remembered that I had neglected the fire.
It had gone out, and there was a lot of black, oily sludge in the grate, because the boiler had leaked again.
Mark welded it all together earlier on in the year, but he was not very optimistic about it, because it had cracked in a lot of places, and he said it was only a matter of time until it cracked again on account of it being old and fragile.
It has cracked again now, and we have got a large black puddle in the hearth. When Mark came home he said that he was not going to weld it any more, and it was time to bite the bullet and order a new boiler. I ordered a new one last year, but I ordered the wrong size, and it had got to be sent back again, and Mark fixed the old one instead.
This time I was not taking any chances, and Mark did it, reeling off numbers and sizes down the telephone with satisfying precision. It is going to cost three hundred and fifty quid, which is scary, because it is almost Christmas and since we don’t have three hundred and fifty quid we will have to save it up.
I think it will be all right, however, because Mark said that there was no need to worry, and has arranged to mend somebody’s car for them tomorrow, which will be a jolly good start, and I can always phone the Electricity Board and ask for the cash that they owe us as well: what a good job that we both have these extra ways of fund raising open to us.
In the evening we went for a swim, we took some new home-made soap with us for the shower, and I really like it very much indeed now that it has had time to go off a bit. It still needs some modification and a better scent, but it feels splendid to use, how clever Mark is. When we have changed the method a bit it will be every bit as nice as the Chanel soap except we have worked out that it will cost £0.33 a bar instead of £22.50, and I don’t really mind that it comes in an old plastic tub and a bit of greaseproof paper, instead of a shiny black and gold box, we all have to make sacrifices.
Mark is not working tonight. He is trying to fix Oliver’s Playstation, which has got a broken socket on it. He doesn’t like not being at work, but he won’t have any other time this week, and we never make much money on Tuesday nights in November anyway, last week we made twenty three pounds between us, which was unusually rubbish even for us.
We tried to get the man at the computer shop to fix it, but he said it was too hard, which meant that he didn’t want to bother trying, so Mark is at home with his soldering iron and my reading glasses trying to replace the socket where you plug the lead in so that Oliver will have a Playstation when he comes home for exeat at weekend. He might not be able to do it, because he said really it needs a very fine solder on it, but since it is broken anyway it can hardly make things any worse.
I am hoping very hard that he manages to fix it. It is Oliver’s favourite thing. The house will not be not the same without Oliver and sometimes Harry playing Nightmare Zombie Death Bloodbath Massacre loudly and excitedly upstairs.
Fingers crossed.
