My husband and Number Two Daughter are being amused because it is midnight and I have not written my diary and also once again I have had too much to drink.
We have not gone to work for a second night which is unspeakably lazy but unavoidable because my taxi is still in bits in Mark’s shed. I expect you can imagine how terribly disappointed I feel about this.
We went over to the farm today for Mark to fix the taxi and for me to carry on taking the camper van to pieces, and in between those things to sit in the camper van drinking coffee and eating the biscuits that I made yesterday, and thinking and rethinking what we might do to it, which was the bit that I liked doing best.
Mark had his head under the bonnet of the car for ages and swore a lot because of the pipes being underneath something else which had got to be unbolted in lots of different places to be taken out just so that he could get to the bit that he wanted to take out. I was helpful and held the torch for a while and even unfastened a bolt by myself once, but after I had been helping for a little while he got a bit impatient and said that he had had enough and that we needed to go home.
When we got home this turned out to have been a good idea because it was eight o’clock at night. It is tiresome that it doesn’t go dark properly in the summer because we never know that it is time to stop doing things, and the clock in the camper van seems to be stuck at some last year’s time, whenever I look at it I know that it is not right but have not managed to work out exactly why.
We took the ceiling down in the camper van.
Underneath it was not as bad as we had expected, some bits had got dreadful soaking black woodwork behind them where the roof vents had been leaking in, probably for years, but not nearly as much as we had been worried about, and on the whole it was a very great deal better than we had dared to hope.
We had got to take all sorts of other bits out to get to the ceiling, like the wardrobe and the cupboards, which left the whole thing looking suddenly very empty.
We have already taken out the kitchen and most of the bathroom. Today we took the floor out of the bathroom as well and discovered the place where the mice had had their nest of babies. This was very sweet in a sentimental sort of way, lots of fluff and bits of chewed-up camper van: but it smelled utterly dreadful, and fortunately Mark had his gloves on to haul the whole thing out and dump it in the bin. There are no mice left there now because of the Mousetrap Horror that we had last winter. I think I would rather not think about that, all those poor little mice.
There is not very much left in the camper van at all. We are going to build bunks for the children and a whole new kitchen and bathroom.
The photograph at the top is the place where the kitchen used to be.
I felt worried, but Mark was perfectly untroubled, and excited by the ideas of what we would build back instead, he has thought of all sorts of things and he is absolutely right, it will be lots and lots better.
We heard the first cuckoo whilst we were there, which was happy, almost the end of May.
By the time we had finished doing everything we were cold and tired and had had enough, so we went home and fortuitously discovered some shepherd’s pie that I had squirrelled away in the freezer after the last time we had visitors, so we had shepherd’s pie and some wine.
Number Two Daughter came to join us, so we had some more wine, and after a short while we had some more.
I am not as horribly intoxicated as I was yesterday, because of the shepherd’s pie, times like yesterday happen when I have not eaten anything much all day and so technically I am having my alcoholic binge for breakfast even though it is really five o’clock in the afternoon.
All the same I am fairly intoxicated and very sleepy.
You will be pleased to know that we have managed to get all of the things done today that we should have done yesterday.
Maybe tomorrow we will catch up on today.
