Lucy went off to the gym with Number Two Daughter this morning.
We were woken up by the early arrival of the post. One of the inconvenient things about having the dog and a box of puppies in the front hall is that anything that comes through the letter box drops directly on to their heads, which invariably results in frenzied barking helpfully intended to alert us all to potential intruders.
This made me really cross yesterday when it turned out to be some ridiculously early riser dropping a charity collection sack through the letterbox, thus getting everybody in the house and possibly the neighbours as well, out of bed.
This morning, fortunately, it was far more exciting, it was a large box containing Mark’s electrical thing, the purpose of which is to enable us to run a microwave from a battery. He has ordered this on eBay and is very excited about it.
It was followed ten minutes afterwards, once the dogs had calmed down and we thought we might try quietly settling back to sleep, by the arrival of ten large tubes of glue.
All of this, as I am sure you know, is destined for use in the camper van, which has swallowed so many tubes of glue already that I don’t know how we can still get in through the door: if nothing else everything is going to be thoroughly stuck down. It might give you an idea of how crumbly everything had become if I tell you that so far our expense on glue alone comes to £216.48, and that doesn’t include sticking the carpets to the ceilings because we had got a bucket of carpet glue already.
Of course none of this came through the letter box on account of being far too big. The postman rang the bell and the same process of barking-and-everybody-out-of-bed followed rapidly. The postman seems to get up in the middle of the night, no wonder he has to go and have a restorative cup of tea in the butcher’s shop halfway round the village.
Once we were all awake our resident daughters came and joined us in bed and told us about their plans for becoming paragons of fitness, and buzzed off to the gym to become sweaty and pink before their breakfast. They telephoned us ten minutes later to explain the necessity of somebody paying for gym membership and the emptiness of their own bank accounts before passing the phone to the man behind the desk in order to facilitate taking my card details to resolve the difficulty.
We had our own exercise for the day with a gentle amble around the Library Gardens to empty the dogs, and the Mark ate an enormous breakfast and buzzed off to the farm and I spent the next hour washing up.
We are actually the possessors of a perfectly functioning dishwasher, which we rarely use because of the ridiculously inflated electricity bills that seem to follow us everywhere we go. Also you can’t wash up nice china mugs in the dishwasher because it scrubs the gold paint off.
This was a perfectly acceptable arrangement when there was only the two of us in residence, but now that we have got a dozen children in the house it is becoming a very time consuming process, and I have begun to think that there is probably a better way of spending my time than scrubbing crusty tomato sauce off plates rescued from underneath the children’s beds. They are all as bad as one another in this respect.
Number Two Daughter and Lucy got home in the end and made themselves scrambled eggs for breakfast and complained about aching.
Once they had vacated the kitchen I discovered that yesterday I had absent mindedly got some chicken out to defrost, and it needed cooking, so I fried it in spiced egg and breadcrumbs. I thought it would be good for picnics over the weekend, except that the window cleaners ate half of it at lunchtime because it smelled so nice.
I spent another half an hour washing up scrambled egg plates and a frying pan with chicken thoroughly stuck to it and thought that we could save ourselves a fortune if only I could achieve the same trick in the camper van.
I think we need some dishwasher tablets.
The picture is Mark’s newly-built wardrobe in the camper van. It is jolly good and I am very impressed.
