Paint

It has been hot.

It has been very pleasant indeed, I have not needed a jumper or hat or scarf or vest all day.

It hasn’t been terribly sunny, in fact actually it has rained quite a bit: but it hasn’t been cold, which is the thing that counts.

After some consideration we have come to the conclusion that the most important thing we can do with the camper is to paint it before the weather gets too cold and damp for paint to dry, because of the fast-approaching chilly season.

We dragged it out of the shed with the dumper truck and we wiped it all down with thinners. This was to get dirt and grease off it. It is a jolly big thing to wipe all over, I can tell you.

Mark sprayed the bottom bit with some special stuff which he explained was to make it look textured like the rest, which seems to work splendidly, except a lot of the rest of the texture is caused by dents and patches over holes, and similar: which are difficult to match up.

After that Mark painted it with primer whilst I did kitchen things. I helped him for a while, but he got cross and said I was rubbish because of drips and runs and things. I thought that was being unnecessarily perfectionist, because I bet when people look at it the first thing they say won’t ever be: “Goodness me, look at that camper van. It has got a run in the paint.”

Just in case they do I took a picture of Mark painting it, so that I could tell people that he was responsible, which made him even grumpier. We are putting the paint on with rollers. He has got a spray gun and a compressor but we were in agreement that a roll-on finish would be far less bother, and more in keeping with the general style of the whole thing anyway.

He declined my offers of help after that, so I went to do kitchen things in my special kitchen camper van. I thought that I would cook some dinner and made two horrible discoveries. The first was that there had been a mouse in the cutlery drawer.

The second was that when Number One Daughter and her family leapt shrieking from the smoking ruin, they had left some sausages in the oven.

Obviously the oven wasn’t still on, but I can tell you that the sausages were no longer very attractive, having been warm and sweaty for a month or so, we get customers like that in the taxis sometimes.

Both discoveries elicited shrieks of horror and flapping about, followed by liberal clouds of spray disinfectant everywhere, followed, after a long period of scrubbing and squeaking, by Mark wondering if his dinner might be ready, which it wasn’t.

After dinner I made some concoctions that I vaguely remembered Number One Daughter making ages ago, you mix fruit and coconut milk and spinach leaves together in a blender and then drink it.

This sounds revolting, but actually it was jolly splendidly good, I put blueberries and raspberries and banana in it, and it just oozed Vitamin C. I didn’t have any spinach, but I had some green stuff that had been reduced to 20p in the Co-op which I think was leaves from the tops of pea plants. Whatever it was it tasted fine and made me feel as though I was a very health-aware modern person, so that was all right.

It started to rain, and we had to get the van back into the shed. It still hasn’t got an engine, so it has to be pulled out by the dumper truck and  then rolled back in down the hill. Mark did the dumper truck bit and I steered the camper, which I accidentally crashed a bit into the table in the workshop. This was because I got confused, because Mark was waving his arms about and shouting: “Stop! Stop!”

I got so worried I forgot to put my foot on the brake and just shouted: “Stop! Stop!” back again, which made him laugh in a very cross sort of way, fortunately he hadn’t got round to painting that bit of the van yet.

It wa a lovely day, warm and happy and outdoors and full of camper van and poopies. We went swimming before work, and when I opened my computer afterwards I had got an email from Oliver.

He would like his friend Maxim to come and stay at exeat, so would I kindly write to Maxim’s mother and ask? He warned me in advance that she was russun, and mite not speke English, and added that his pinquin duvet cover made him homesick, becus every time he looked at the pinquins they made him think of me and Mark.

It is clear that this healthy living is a sensible idea.