Night Off

All things being as they should be I have been assured that we should now have illustrations.

With this in mind I attached the nice picture of the koala sent to me by the web hosting people.

When I looked at the site I was not pleased to discover there is no koala on my page, although it appears to have uploaded on to my drafting pages. It may well be that I am going to have to spend tomorrow on the phone trying to put it right all over again.

I don’t really mind about this, because the American people at the computer hosting place were very lovely indeed, and one of them said to me that he thought that the media uploading should be doing some really cool jiving by now. I was enchanted by this comment, and asked him to stop talking for just a moment and wrote that down so that I would not forget what a lovely thing he had just said.

I like Americans, they have an unquenchable enthusiasm for life that we British find entirely embarrassing, going to Disneyland on your birthday is an experience only to be remembered in awful flashes in the still dark moments of the night. The people at the web host were completely charming and breezed happy energy down the telephone and I was both impressed and relieved that I was never likely to have to share an office with them.

In complete contrast to an American office, last night was one of the most peaceful nights I have ever had in a taxi.

I wrote to you and thought about things a bit, and ate my picnic and watched people walking past: and got bored and went for a swim. I had a cup of tea with Mark, and wrote a letter to Oliver and an email to Lucy, and then in the end just sat and read my library book. This was a worrying book written about a person who went to school and shot everybody. My school had its depressing moments but as far as I recall nobody turned up with a shotgun, although I think the chemistry teacher might have fantasised about it.

I finished reading the whole book, because it was so very quiet.

When we got home at the end of the night we had made twenty three pounds between us, which worked out at £2.30 per hour.

In consequence we have decided not to go to work tonight but to have a holiday, because there won’t be anybody here until tomorrow anyway, when it starts to be the bank holiday weekend.

We had a busy day doing busy things. Mark carried on putting the roof on his log shed but eventually got fed up of having melting snow running off the brim of his hat and down the back of his neck and came back in. I did some ironing.

The ironing was almost the cause of me being responsible for a terrible crime.

I went up to the children’s beautifully clean and laundered rooms yesterday to find to my astonished horror that the wicked dogs had been on the lovely freshly ironed white sheets on the beds. They had plundered around and leaked a bit and left paw prints and dog hairs and some dribble. It was very fortunate that at the moment I discovered it both dogs were at the farm with Mark and not in the house, or I might have done things too dreadfully violent to report in a diary which is broadly suitable for family reading.

As it was I peeled the sheets off and washed them again, and today I pressed them back to their pristine smoothness with the splendid rotary iron. Neither dog understood why I would not share my biscuit with them when I had my coffee afterwards, but I felt that some small vengeance was called for. Mark shared his biscuit with them anyway, and we put the board back across the bottom of the middle stairs so that they can’t get up there any more.

We have decided to have a glass of wine and some pasta and watch a film since we are not going to go to work. This is the most lovely holiday thing to do, and I am very much looking forward to it, what a splendid end to the day.

Mark is putting the pan on the stove now.

See you tomorrow.