We woke up at ten past eight and turned the radio on almost before our eyes were opened, to find out about the fate of our nation.
We were just in time to hear the Prime Minister announcing from Downing Street that he was resigning.
It was quite the most amazing feeling, to be lying sleepily in our own bed listening to history was being made far away in London, and we listened to the sadness in his voice and felt awful sympathy for him, what a hard thing to be leaving a job which must have absorbed his whole soul for years.
We switched it off when he had finished speaking, because of thinking that probably we would hear plenty of opinions and analysis over the next few days without needing to spoil our coffee with them. We had coffee and wondered about the new world. Number Two Daughter joined us in our wonderings, until we remembered that the dogs needed to be emptied and had to get on with the day, which despite the new world, remained pretty much as usual.
Mark went to the farm, and I stayed at home to clean up the mess. When you have been very busy doing hard working things to an elderly camper van you don’t come home and hoover. You come home, and if you have not run out of money and don’t need to go to work, you have a glass of wine, yawn a great deal, shower the worst of the sawdust and glue off, and go to bed.
This is exactly what we have been doing, and so our house was a sad muddle. I don’t know how we have managed to make such a dreadful mess when we haven’t been in it very much, it isn’t even as if we had left the dogs behind to make a mess on our behalf, they have been with us at the farm lying in the sunshine and chasing anything that would obligingly run away.
I resolved this morning that I would address the issue.
This meant a day full of doing things like picking up washing and sweeping up crumbs. I don’t much like picking up washing or sweeping up crumbs, but I do like to live in a house without washing all over the place and sticky grit all over the floors, and so today was the day on which I had to bite the bullet. Mark went off to the farm to stick patches on the holes in the camper van roof, and I got the hoover out and set the washing machine off.
The day was helped along for a while by the assorted squeaks and gasps of Radio Four coming to terms with an exit from the EU and asking everybody they could possibly manage to drag in off the street what they thought about it.
Incidentally I had my own little on-street poll later on, when I asked one of the Hungarian taxi drivers what he though about it. He shrugged, and said that when Hungary entered the EU in the first place they had held a referendum about whether they should join or not, and that he had voted no: so he could hardly say that he thought it was a bad idea, although obviously he had some intensified interest in future developments under the circumstances.
By the end of the day the house was tidier than it had been at the beginning, and also I had cooked an enormous tray full of sausages to help with hungry moments over the weekend. We had clean sheets in the bed and fewer crumbs on the floor and Mark rang up to tell me that the camper van had not got nearly so many holes in it, which was also good.
We went to work then.
No change so far, then.
