Dearie me, things are getting exciting at Ibbetson Towers at the moment.
The very good news is that Mark has fixed the chimney. He has been up there all day on the frosty roof, cementing and building and patiently fixing everything, and then he finished the extra welding that needed to be doing to the steel plate. This is a brilliant step forward, if we had been the sort of people who need to get builders to come and help them we would still be phoning round for estimates. We have been splendidly fortunate, the Weather Gods have stayed supportively on side, and all is well in the chimney department.
I went up there at the end of the day and we stood with our heads out of the window and looked round a bit, it is a superlatively stunning view, you can see for miles and miles across to the Langdales, and Windermere has the nicest collection of roofs I think I have ever seen, you could easily imagine Dick Van Dyke turning up to be energetically tuneful around the chimneys. I took a picture, as you can see, but really it was too dark for you to be able to appreciate it properly.
However…
We have had the most awful disaster.
Mark had left a bag of sand in the back of his car this morning and when he came to get it out he couldn’t find the keys.
In the end, after some puzzled searching of course we found them in the washing machine. Mark always empties his pockets when he takes his trousers off, leaving a tiresome pile of handkerchiefs and screws and five pence pieces on the bookcase next to the laundry basket.
Last night he forgot.
There is never anything in his pockets so I never bother to check them.
The electronic key for his car was in his pocket.
It has been thoroughly laundered, and now it does not work at all.
He was jolly upset. I could tell he was cross because he went very quiet. When I am cross I shout and throw things about, but Mark just gets a sort of still look and stops talking.
We can’t get into his car, never mind start it. He is downstairs now with the key in bits on the table trying to understand the internal circuitry of a car key. It is a stupid key anyway, it isn’t key shaped but a flat thing that you have to shove into a slot. It has got a little key piece inside it, but it turns out that this bit does not work on anything, Mark says that the locking mechanism for this will have seized because it has never been used, and in any case it would not start the engine anyway.
He had to go in my car to get some more sand, which is not great because my car has got no steering at all and instead has a nasty smell of burning. He had to put some engine oil into the power steering. Engine oil is thick and treacly and will stop everything grinding to a terrible halt even though it just leaks straight out on to the road. Fortunately the road to the builders’ merchant is pretty straight and he got back all right.
Tomorrow is Friday and we do not have a single usable taxi, and the car key problem is very serious indeed.
I have got no idea what we are going to do, we have got to earn some money this weekend. I am cross with myself because my parents gave the children some cash after Christmas which we could have pinched for school fees, and virtuously I stuck it in a high return share account instead, which is doing brilliantly well. They are now twenty quid richer than they were on Monday and we are flat broke after Christmas and unable to work.
As we all know, it will come out all right in the end, these things always do.
After all, it is nice not to be working, like a holiday but more worrying.
Watch this space.
