Sock Game

I have torn my toenail in half again.

I did it this morning whilst playing a fairly violent, and entirely ridiculous game with the dogs this morning. It is called The Sock Game, because of the involvement of one of Grandad’s retired socks, but mostly it involves an awful lot of leaping about and getting out of breath for me, and a lot of dashing about barking excitedly for the dogs. My dog, actually, because Mark’s dog doesn’t understand the rules properly and gets it wrong, after which she always gets fed up and grumpy and sulks.

We finish up playing The Sock Game whenever I sit down in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and nothing to eat. If I am eating a mince pie or similar snack food, then obviously the most important thing to do if you are a dog is to sit up on your hind legs and produce your best loveable-and-hungry expression.

They do this even though they don’t actually like mince pies, it is a point of principle. Anyway, this morning I wasn’t eating mince pies or bits of sausage or anything else interesting, and before I knew it there was a sock on my knee, with a hopeful dog determinedly attached to the other end of it. After that there was some sock-related-violence, and several enthusiastic passes of The Sock Game until suddenly my toenail caught on a torn corner of often-killed-sock just as the dog dashed away with it.

I have glued it back down with Super Glue, the toenail, not the sock, obviously, but really feel as though nobody else is suitably appreciating my resulting incapacity. Also I unfortunately stuck two of my toes together by accident and had to prise them apart hastily before the glue completely set. Now I have got an Alarming Toenail and have had to spend the day limping cautiously around the house and guarding it carefully in case it snags on anything else with appalling consequences.

After I had squeaked, and shown everybody, and finally become heroically Uncomplaining, we had a post-Christmas tidy up. The house has become filled with empty cardboard containers and a depressing quantity of confectionery wrappers, and of course everywhere is still damply sprouting black mould like a Victorian magician’s whiskers.

This turned out to have a happy solution, because the sun shone today. This gave me a brief moment of concern when I opened the curtains this morning, and just for a fraction of a second wondered what the yellow light could be. Anyway, for the first time in ages this morning, it was not actually raining, but clear, and bright, and dry. We threw open the windows joyously, and let the cool breeze blow through the house, which was chilly but tremendously uplifting, we have been feeling warm and moist-fungussy for weeks now, and it was just brilliant to feel fresh again.

I changed all the sheets then, and Mark scrubbed the mould off the walls under the windows, and we hoovered and threw away rubbish and made our lives feel refreshed again.

This does not sound like an awfully taxing activity, and it surprises me to realise that it took us all day. I have been wracking my brain to wonder what else I have done, because I feel as if I have been terribly busy, but actually we have got so disordered and mired in damp that the cleaning process took all four of us all of the daylight hours.

The only other thing we have done of any note is ordered a new chain for Mark’s chainsaw, which took about an hour of faffing about pointlessly on Amazon with an oily chainsaw close to hand, counting drive teeth and guide teeth, and wondering where on earth you are supposed to measure for an accurate bar length.

Somebody very kindly gave us an ace Christmas present of a book all about the way Norwegians do logging, and despite firmly believing that we already knew absolutely everything that there is to know about the subject, we have both been captivated and inspired by it, and also discovered that we don’t know quite as much as we thought.

We have no other heating other than the log-burner, it is our mainstay and our pride and joy. When the fire goes out life feels a bit bleak, as though someone has snuffed out the life-spark in the centre of our home. We like to have a tidy log-stack, when it is full it is tangible wealth, beautiful to look at and assuring us of safety and well-being for winters to come.

We have been inspired by pictures of beautiful and creative log-stacking arrangements, and reminded that January is our perfect month for log-related activities, because we have got the time. Mark’s chainsaw blade has been sharpened until it is almost flat: so we have ordered a new one ready for the new year, and for January logging, for cutting and stacking the logs to dry that we will be burning during another, still long in the future, merry Christmas.

I love this thought.