Insolvent

We were woken up at one o’ clock this afternoon by the phone ringing, and I had to admit guiltily to my cheery friend at the other end of the line that the reason I was struggling to make sensible conversation was because actually I was still asleep.

When she had gone we had coffee and took a long, unhappy look around us.

The house was in the most dreadful mess.

The dog and her new puppies smelled truly awful. The living room was full of Lucy’s newly dumped luggage. The bathroom was starting to sprout horrible blobs of black mould. Nobody had dusted anything for weeks, and due to an inadequate quantity of hours in the day, we hadn’t washed up since the day before yesterday.

It was horrid. Truly horrid, in the cold, dark gloomy way that unloved houses have, and I felt terribly guilty, because Lucy had come home to a mess, and not a happy bright little home.

Lucy, who had come to join us in bed for coffee, obviously had not noticed any mess, although she pointed out that she liked it best when there were things to eat in the fridge.

We drank our coffee and resolved to mend our wicked idle ways, and to restore our house to its tidy self: and we did.

We brushed the ashes out of the stove to sprinkle on the lawn, and cleaned the hearth, and Mark brought fresh logs in so that the fireplace was clean and welcoming again. We sorted out all of Lucy’s luggage and she put her books in her bedroom and we scrubbed her hockey boots and put her washing into piles to do a bit at a time. We bathed both of the horrible stinky dogs, and put fresh bedding in the box with the puppies, and then Mark cleaned the bathroom.

We dusted and polished and washed and swept until everything started to feel beautiful again. I sprayed our drawers with cologne and changed the water in the flower vases and replaced the tired flowers with bright new ones out of the garden. We put fresh fruit in the fruit bowls and washed the dirty dishes and when we had finished I felt so happy to know that my world was tidy and bright again.

We moved the dog and her very squeaky puppies out to the hallway outside our bedroom, because of preferring not to be woken up a dozen times in the night because somebody has accidentally stuck their paw into somebody else’s ear. The dog seems to be quite sanguine about this, and also seems to have largely recovered from her digestive problems, and just those two things alone will make a colossal improvement to life.

We had got to go and earn some cash before we could do much about the fridge, because of our generally rather short-term financial arrangements. Over the last few weeks we have spent every last penny on bits of wire and glue and screws and plywood to put in the camper van, and in consequence have not really bothered much with anything else. On top of this, now we had the added problem that since we had had a rather pruned working weekend we had only just got enough cash for the first down payment on the month’s school fees and nothing left over.

After some thought we scraped together some change out of our floats and bought pizza and apples on which to feed everybody. We explained to Lucy that we would try and earn as much money as we could over the next couple of days in order to have a trip to Asda. She thought this would be acceptable, and that pizza and apples would suffice in the meantime, so we left her arranging her books in neat rows and went to work.

Sunday is not a brilliant night for earning the vast sums that a shopping trolley in Asda will demand, and really we should have not done cleaning but gone to work. However we are here now, on the taxi rank, and little by little we are slowly accumulating enough to buy some butter and vegetables and washing up liquid.

I do like our lives very much. It must be dreadful to run out of money and know that you have got to wait until the end of the month.

I am quite sure we will be solvent again in a matter of days.