Once again I have parcelled myself up in Mark’s thermal underwear and braved the frozen horror of his workshop.
I painted some more flowers and a butterfly, but by the end of it I was so terribly cold that I really didn’t give a hoot what the paintings looked like. I was so desperate to stop that the butterfly could actually be anything at all, and I might turn it into a blackberry yet.
My fingers were numb, my nose was raw and dripping, and my toes felt like frozen pebbles attached to the ends of my feet.
In the end I warmed my hands up on Mark’s back enough to abandon the endeavour and drive myself home. Mark stayed there for absolutely ages. He is rebuilding the front of the van.
Because the engine is too big for the hole he has had to put a gusset in the grill at the front. so that it sticks out a bit. It is disappointingly subtle. If you didn’t know you would never, ever guess that it was a bodge job to try and fit the front of the van around a disproportionately sized engine.
I suggested that we painted a belt on it and a bulging check shirt above, so that it would look like middle aged spread, but Mark won’t, and is going to paint it sensible yellow and green like the rest of the van. We have just discovered that these are Rastafarian colours, and that we are going to spend the rest of our lives being stopped by policemen who think we look dodgy, perhaps because the Rastafarians have also discovered that you can buy reject paints from John Deere and JCB at bargain prices.
I have taken a photograph of it and attached it above. You can see that the headlights are where they are supposed to be and the rest of the grill has been cunningly shunted forward a bit in order to accommodate the radiator behind it. It is jolly clever, especially when you consider that he must have done it all with cold fingers.
The lid that goes over the top of the engine has got to be fixed next, you can see in the picture that it is a bit rusty, and that isn’t even the worst bit of it. The sheet of tin to repair it arrived this morning. It will be nice to have it fixed. At the moment whenever you slam it bits fall off.
Once I had sloped guiltily away I got our picnic ready for work. This was not a terrible hardship tonight, because last night, to our joy, we took a night off.
This idleness was prompted by the fact that the night before had been so completely unprofitable that if we had given all of our customers a free journey, we wouldn’t have been much out of pocket. My takings reached double figures, but only just: and so we made an executive decision not to jolly well bother.
Then we had the inspired idea of blowing our savings.
As regular readers might know, we save up all our two pound coins in a special money box for an emergency. The last emergency was Christmas.
Since then it turned out that we had saved almost forty pounds.
Delighted with this discovery, we weighted our pockets down with them and trotted across the road to the Magic Wok. We like the Magic Wok, because they are friendly and walk their dog in the Library Gardens sometimes at three in the morning when all of the customers have gone, so sometimes we see one another then. Also the food is nice and there is a great deal of it.
We spent our thirty six pounds eating until we could hardly get out from behind the table. We ate rice and chow mein and prawn toast and all sorts of gorgeous salty delights, washed down with huge glasses of red wine, and thought how wonderful life was.
When we had waddled home we emptied the dogs, and then despite the fact that it was only half past eight, we had showers and collapsed roundly into bed, where we lay, groaning with portly contentment, and were asleep in what was probably rather less than a minute.
We slept for twelve hours, and hence do not feel at all miserable or weary at work tonight.
This is just as well, because there is a long time to go yet.
