We had an excited moment this morning.
I discovered that Mark had ordered a new horn for the camper van.
It is an unexpected horn. It is called a classic horn, which means that it makes the sort of noise which one might associate with clown cars at the circus, and it arrived today whilst we were having breakfast.
Of course we couldn’t wait at all, and instantly took it into the garden where we connected it to a battery and tried it.
The honking noise was deafening, think Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
It made me laugh so much that I dropped it. Apparently it woke one of our taxi driver neighbours up as well, he lives quite some distance away so we thought that was quite satisfyingly impressive.
We tried it two or three times and then thought that perhaps we had better stop.
We laughed on and off all the way through the rest of breakfast whenever we remembered the noise. It makes me laugh just thinking about it now.
Mark took it with him to the farm to be fitted. It will be brilliant, except that it will be no good at all for times when you get road rage and want to be unkind to people. Nobody is going to take your indignation seriously with a horn like that.
This is a good thing, because it will help us stay calm and mellow, which you might as well do if your anger is just going to make other people laugh, a bit like an irate three year old. Lucy used to get very cross and tell us that we had wooined her life, wooined, wooined, wooined. We tried very hard not to laugh at the time, but of course we did afterwards, secretly.
Once Mark had gone I celebrated my state of liberation on International Women’s Day by doing some cooking and cleaning. I wiped round the bathroom and emptied the bins and then cooked sausages for picnics, and cherry shortbread, and a chocolate fruitcake, and a risotto for dinner.
I am not sure exactly what liberated is really, but on the whole I do what I like, so I suppose I could consider that I probably am. Also I am not scared of Mark, even when he is cross about something, although in which case it is probably better not to make him any crosser, because he swears a great deal, and has to go out into the garden or the workshop until he feels better. He is never cross with me anyway, except for when I accidentally wash his wallet, which is really his own fault for not emptying his pockets
The sun shone, so I hung the washing outside in the garden, where it dried beautifully, and I felt very early-spring happy. I opened the windows and the doors, and the house feels splendidly clean, as if new air out of the garden was somehow better than old air out of the bathroom.
We had a taxi-driver friend visit us for dinner this evening, which was a happy event. He lives in the flat across the alley and is doing things with Mark at the workshop and on the allotment. The two of them are busy redesigning the rotivator in order that it will function as a sort of motorised wheelbarrow. It is nice to watch middle-aged men being enthusiastic about their inventions. They are busy having ideas for things that they can manufacture with bits of pipe out of the builders’ skip at the back.
We are having an early night now, because we all decided that there was no point in going to work after last night, which was possibly my least profitable night in a taxi ever. In any case we had sunk an awful lot of red wine anyway.
There is always tomorrow
