We have had a night off.
I have spent all day cooking things and washing and trying to restore order in a post-children household.
Mark has spent all day doing things to the axle of the camper van. I don’t know what the things are. They involved holes and brackets. I agreed that it was very trying and tiresome and that it would be a very good thing when it was finished.
I was doing mass catering before the vegetables that we bought last week went off. I must have felt enthusiastic in Asda, because I made enough dinners to last us for the next ten days. It is not exactly Jamie Oliver, because I just put all my favourite ingredients into everything and didn’t consider until afterwards that this would probably lead to a fairly boring result: but I won’t care and Mark won’t notice, I wonder how long it will take before we are sick of things cooked with added bacon and in red wine and cream sauce.
I was in a terrible hurry to get back to my book, which is why my catering efforts were so completely rubbish. I am now on Chapter Twenty Two. This was actually cheating a bit because a couple of the chapters were really long and so I have cut them in half, thus giving myself two extra chapters with almost no extra work whatsoever.
We should have gone to work because of having no money at all anywhere, but we were completely fed up of sitting on the taxi rank to earn about one pound fifty an hour between us, so we didn’t. We stayed at home and had a very contented sort of evening. I went upstairs to write my book and Mark sat downstairs at the kitchen table making solar panels out of some cells and some bits of wire. This takes ages. He has been doing it all evening, and it is a tremendous fiddle.
We have also done lots of useful maintenance things that we can’t do on the taxi rank, but which aren’t job-like enough to waste time on during the day, like sorting out the reasons that Mark’s lap-top computer keeps going wrong, and getting rid of lots of drivel which has been squatting on my computer, occupying massive chunks of the memory. These things are good to do because they make us feel as though we have got our lives tidily under control. This is not at all the case, but it is a nice feeling.
Once I had washed the sheets and baked shortbread and filled the freezer with plastic bags full of catering I was finally free to fill the big teapot and settle down to imagine adventures.
I passed a blissful hour doing this before Mark came home. When he got in he was in a grumpy mood because of some irritation related to his mother. His mother has buzzed off to Spain for the winter but left behind her a series of tiresome arrangements for land usage which she had neglected to mention to anybody, and so Mark got to the farm this morning to find a total stranger with a tractor fencing off the field at the end of the drive, and his mother’s phone switched off.
He is used to peculiar behaviour from his parents, so apart from being surprised and making acerbic comments about dementia, he has been admirably sanguine about the whole thing. I think he is being very patient. The field in question had a nice bench on it that walkers used to sit on to eat their packed lunches, and now they can’t, which I think is very sad.
Mark rolled his eyes and said that it might be a good end to the day to have a glass of wine and a night off, so that is what we did.
We are going to go to bed now.
