More rain today.
After Mark had gone over to the farm I had got to bring the logs in. Usually he does this, because it is a cold grubby job and so I have always pretended to be too feminine and delicate to help. However since he had got to spend the whole day in the cold damp shed up to his elbows in gearbox oil I magnanimously offered to bring the logs in at home all by my brave little self.
Of course this is not at all a difficult or problematic job really. I have got a bit of carpet that rolls out over the real carpet so that I can trudge garden mud in without worrying, and once logs are dry, which obviously they are supposed to be before you put them on your fire, they are not heavy to carry. When Mark worked away I had to do it myself all the time. I used to make it the first job of the day after I had done the school runs, so that it was over and done with, and also so that even if the rest of the day turned into a hopeless flop I would have chalked up at least one achievement.
The logs are under their own little roofs, and stacked higher than my head all along one side of the garden. We have covered them very carefully, but it turned out that they were not at all dry, and some of them were blackly squelchy, and covered with worms desperate to get out of the saturated ground. I tried to knock all of the worms off, because immolation in our stove must be an unspeakably horrible fate, but don’t know if I managed it or not, there could have been all kinds of creatures lurking under the sodden bark, with any luck most of them will make a wormy run for it before they get as far as the stove.
Eventually both sides of the stove were neatly stacked with steaming logs. I swept the hearth and covered everything over carefully again, and then thought that since I was already wet I might do some restorative work in our poor battered garden.
I spent an hour pruning and tidying and sweeping up sticks. I was soaked to the skin by the time I had finished. Actually I hadn’t so much finished as had enough, which I had very thoroughly. I was wet through, and some horrible mouldy monsoon-related fungus had got all over my hands and made them swell up like cheap blotchy sausages and itch like mad, and I had to go and run them under a cold tap and recover for a while with a cup of coffee and some self-pitying antihistamines.
The garden looked considerably improved, though and I had completely filled the dustbin from the end house with dead leaves and bits of stick. Nobody is living in the end house at the moment and so the dustbin is regarded as a communal asset by the rest of the street, which is very useful indeed, we will all be sorry when somebody eventually buys it.
After that I got on with Oliver’s school packing. I scrubbed the left over farm off his boots and sent some e-mails to school until we had finally established that his towels had not dematerialised out of existence or gone off in Lucy’s trunk but were still safely in the school washroom and that Matron would kindly ensure that they were washed on my behalf before the start of term, for which I was grateful, especially since it meant that I could desist in my frantic efforts to find them.
There was also an email from Lucy who thought she would like to add some useful things to my school bill, to which I agreed. It was all right to agree, as we are back out at work again tonight, because, as the sage, often quoted taxi-driver wisdom goes, you’ve got to be in it to win it.
There is almost no work for taxis at this time of year, so we occupy ourselves very busily doing lots of other things instead of sitting on the taxi rank, but we still work at weekends, because if there is any chance of winning it at all, it is at weekend. In any case we have got some school bills and an Autoparts bill to pay.
So once again I am writing from the taxi rank, and indeed I am winning it, because I am nine pounds and sixty pence better off than I was at the beginning of the evening, which is a good start.
Between us we will have earned enough for a gearbox in no time.
