More sunshine.
I am taking advantage of this to get all of our curtains washed, and dried on the washing line
What a page turner this diary is.
Mark took the dogs out from under my feet and off to the farm, and whilst the curtains were churning around the washing machine and flapping on the line I baked shortbread.
I made some peanut and chocolate shortbread, and some cherry and almond shortbread.
They are all massive heavy curtains and I can only fit one at a time in the washing machine. They are made of thick upholstery fabrics with a dense blackout lining. This is partly to keep the house warm in the icy blasts of winter, but partly because if you work at nights and sleep all day, it is good to be able to exclude the daylight, like vampires.
I would have liked to sleep all day, but obviously I didn’t. We got up and took down the curtains from our bedroom window. That was an act of decisive finality, because of course once the curtains were gone we couldn’t then go back to bed. This is important because very often we have an afternoon snooze.
You can’t take all of your clothes off and go to bed in the room right next to the front door in the middle of the day if you have not got any curtains, especially if you are expecting a delivery.
As you know, we were expecting a delivery, and in fact today it actually turned up.
We are now the proud owners of a robotic hoover.
We were very excited when it came. We took it into the garden in the sunshine and tried to work out what you are supposed to do with it.
It had a very long instruction book, and obviously we got bored after the first few minutes and started experimenting with it instead, to see what would happen.
We plugged it in to its charger and explained to it what day and time it was. This is because if you want to tell it on Monday that you would like it to hoover on Thursday morning, you can do that, especially if you have read the instructions, which we haven’t.
We had to leave it charging for age upon impatient age, because it is new and you have got to leave a new thing charging for a long time.
Mark was back from the farm before it was ready.
We switched it on.
It is the oddest little thing I have ever seen. It beetles busily about the floor, sweeping and bumping into chair legs. It goes round and round and up and down, and as far as we can tell it seems to leave the floor a lot cleaner behind it.
It is difficult to tell whether this is the case, because whilst I was baking I got so much flour all over the place that I had to hoover whilst the robot was still charging, so the floor was already clean to start with.
The crumbs that were left on the floor after Mark found the shortbread seem to have gone.
The dogs do not like it at all, and hid on the stairs, quaking and trembling. Mark thinks that we will have to use it upstairs when we are at work, because it is a very short step from a dog being frightened of something, to a dog deciding that it needs to be taught a lesson and killing it thoroughly. I do not want this to happen to my exciting new hoover.
I could have watched it for ages. We were so fascinated by its tranquil industriousness that we were late for work anyway. It is an absolutely astonishing machine, a bit like an enormous black ladybird, and I am very pleased with it indeed.
It could really be true that my days of endless hoovering are coming to an end.
There can be no more pleasing thought.
