I am making Christmas cards, and as Mark jovially predicted, I have got glitter everywhere.
I have been as careful as it is possible to be, but somehow I have got glue all over my fingers, all over my desk, and glitter stuck to everything.
The children came and helped for a while but departed when they got bored. The brief period just before they departed did nothing to help with the glitter-related difficulties, and now it is very late and is going to take me some time to clear up.
It might have been better if I had gone to work.
I am currently unable to work on account of not having a taxi, or rather, having a taxi that does not go. I borrowed one last night from Lakeside Taxis, and thus we are not having an absolute financial crisis, but things are not good, I can tell you. We make most of our money on Saturday night and I am not there, I am at home making glittery sticky things with the children. This is brilliantly enjoyable but making me feel terribly guilty.
I am trying to be sanguine about it because obviously it is just one of those things, and can’t be helped. Mark will buy a new engine on Monday and we will be back in business again, at least after he has done an awful lot of heavy getting engines in and out of the taxi.
He is not looking forward to this because he usually lifts engines in and out of broken cars with the help of a digger, and he does not have a digger or even an hydraulic tractor any more. He has been trying to find somebody to borrow something from, but so far without any luck. I can’t help there either, because almost everybody I know does not have a spare digger hanging about, which is tiresome, although our friend Paddy very kindly offered to sell us one of his taxis at a breathtakingly cheap price, which was monumentally kind but still out of our budget.
To break even on a transaction like that at the moment he would have to give us a couple of hundred quid to take it away, on account of the boiler, so we think we will probably have to say no, but we thought how very touched we were by the generosity of people: Lakeside Taxis and Paddy are our competitors and apart from ridiculing us for being rubbish they have helped us out no end, which has been really warming and happy.
Of course as well as that, the break is wonderful. I should have gone to work during the day today, really, by way of trying to make up for it, but this did not happen because the children are home, and Mark got called to an emergency at the farm, meaning that I did not have a car and the children did not have anybody else to make their toast and chocolate spread sandwiches.
The weather last night was very exciting indeed: heavy rain, and then enormous gusts of wind, and then snow. The fell tops are white today, and everywhere is frozen.
When we took the dogs for their last empty in the Library Gardens it was so very windy that it wasn’t nice. We got to the part under the trees and a huge bellow of a gale roared through, and we grabbed each others’ hands and ran. This morning there were lots of fallen branches where we had been walking, but happily we had not been speared to a horrible death by any of them, so that was all right.
We had not been up for very long when Mark’s sister called from the farm because a huge tree had blown down across the road and nobody could get in or out that way, so Mark drove over there and they waved at each other from their opposite sides of the tree and between them they cut it up and hauled it back to the farm for winter firewood, which is always a brilliant thing to happen.
I brought the logs in here whilst he was out, which I like doing, apart from the slugs in them, because you have got to try and scrape them off so that they don’t meet a dreadful fiery death. It feels encouraging to have a stack of logs in the house, the dry woody smell is one of the splendid things about the winter.
These logs are not very dry because of the recent weather adventures, they have been stacked under their own little roofs but have still got terribly damp, which is not good for the slug problem, and lots of worms have crawled up into the stack in a desperate attempt not to drown in the sodden soil.
And so winter has crept up on us.
We are warm and well-fed and safe. It is quite all right.
