I have been a terribly busy sort of person again today.
Mark went over to the farm to remove the towing hitch from the spare Doblo which he has got stored in his shed in order to fit it to mine. It is very handy to have a complete set of spare parts for a car in this way, I can recommend it, it has saved us an awful lot of messing about in scrapyards.
He fitted the towing hitch to my taxi and then set about mending his trailer. He has unearthed a set of wheels for it which he says nearly fit it with a bit of hammer adjustment, and it will be all right if we stick to the quiet back roads in the dark.
Whilst he was engaged in this activity I stayed at home and cleaned things.
We had a sofa misfortune the other week when Roger Poopy was given some Chinese spare ribs to eat. He was obliged to eat them in the garden because of the Peking sauce, but of course he has developed a terror of Slenderman hiding under the sage bush, and hence whilst nobody was looking he dashed inside to eat them in the safety of the sofa: which, when I discovered what he was doing, turned out to be not as safe as he thought.
There was horrible brown sticky Peking sauce slurped about everywhere and I was not pleased, because apart from being revolting in its own right, it did look very much as though somebody had had an exceedingly unfortunate accident. It was so bad that when Oliver came home he refused to sit on it: and so today was the Day Of Sofa Action.
I stripped the covers off and chucked them in the washing machine, and then scrubbed all of the non-removable bits with special anti-poopy shampoo. I pegged the covers out on the line and managed to get them back in just a fraction of a minute before the Weather Gods noticed them, but it was all right, because they had dried.
Of course once we had got clean sofa covers we needed to clean everything else as well.
I polished the grandfather clock and the dresser and the pictures. I hoovered and washed and buffed and rubbed and sprayed and brushed, and it took me the entire day.
What an exciting life I do lead.
When Mark finally came home and washed his oily hands in my nice clean sink I was too tired even to argue, and after almost no persuasion at all I agreed that it would be a really lovely idea not to bother going to work.
We made sure that we couldn’t change our minds by having a glass of wine straight away. Then Mark cooked pasta with olives and pesto and pine nuts in it, and we ate it with big slabs of buttery tomato-bread in front of a film. It is ages since we have watched a film, and it was ace just to sit on a clean sofa and do absolutely nothing productive at all for a couple of hours,
The film was about WikiLeaks, who astonished the world by announcing that some bankers are corrupt, that sometimes soldiers shoot people who aren’t soldiers, and that in some parts of Africa if the dictators don’t like you they kill you. It was a good film but on the whole I preferred Harry Potter.
After the film we sat in our rocking chairs for a little while with a glass of beautifully smooth cognac, and agreed that all this loafing about is very nice but we would probably get bored if we had to do it very often
There is hardly any dust left anywhere at all.
