This is going to be a short diary entry because there is absolutely no way I have got the energy to be creative enough to find seven hundred words describing today in breathtaking detail.
We have been at the farm almost all day, once again doing things to the camper van.
We arrived to find that Mark’s sister was busily doing things to her log collection, along with some blokes and a huge noisy machine. You can see her on the picture, she is the one driving the dumper truck. I think this is very impressive, because whenever I have driven the dumper truck it has been terrifyingly loud and uncontrollable and not at all done the things that I thought it would do whenever I have pressed things or poked things to try and make it work. She is jolly clever because she didn’t seem scared at all, just got on with it with hardly any swearing or anything.
She had told us that she would be doing this but obviously we had forgotten all about it, it was ace watching enormous branches being turned into handy firewood. The wood has been lying about for ages so it is very dry and will burn brilliantly, next winter their house will be splendidly warm.
She said that we can have some as well, which is very kind of her, and I guiltily thought we ought to help her to stack it but then we didn’t because we were busy doing things to the camper van. She stacked wood all day which was nice because she was there to chat to and be sociable with, but we would have helped if we had been nicer people.
We weren’t nice people, only guilty-feeling ones, and we got on with the camper van.
I scrubbed the roof. This was scary because of being high up and also because the camper van is jacked up on one side so the roof has got a pronounced slope. It had got to be scrubbed because the new roof lights have got to go in and Mark is going to stick some things on there that he has bought to make a solar panel.
It was horrible, mud and green moss and a very great deal of bird poo. Mark cut a hole in the bathroom roof and I scraped and scrubbed and swayed about on the ladder and perched on a bit of plywood on the top, and in the end it was clean. There is a bird’s nest just above it which has not been helping but I think that all the babies are just about gone now, they can all buzz off and poo somewhere else.
The big logging machine made a bit of a racket, which we didn’t mind except it seemed to disturb the insect life, and the shed was absolutely full of horseflies. Mark killed them by the dozen, and even I swatted five or six. They have got a horrible bite, and by the time I came down from the roof I was itching terribly from half a dozen different punctures.
We worked on and on until late into the evening, when Number Two Daughter called from work to tell us that somebody had given her a broken down car as a tip, and could we come and help with it. We went over and Mark said that it would not be terribly difficult to sort out, got it started and drove it home, so now she has got another car.
It is a very nice car, she thought perhaps they were drug dealers so we looked to see if they had left any drugs behind but they hadn’t, although there was a half-eaten pie in the glove box.
We came home and drank wine after that. We should have gone to work but we were so completely tired that we just didn’t.
There is always tomorrow.
