Another day at the farm.
We took our morning coffee with us in the flask and drank it there, accompanied by thick slices of bread made with tomato pesto and almonds.
It was warm and dry. So warm that I took off my top jumper, the thick one with the padding. Obviously I kept the other two on, this is the Lake District after all.
Our project of the day was to cover the newly made dashboard. We had got to do this together to start with, because it was a bit complicated. Towards the end Mark got impatient with my help and I left him to get on with it whilst I carried on painting.
He has glued underlay foam all over it and we had bought a length of chocolate-brown fabric that is pretending to be suede. It pretends very well, we thought it was lovely.
We made a flat space on the top of the trailer with a bit of board, and cut and glued and folded until we had a dashboard that you could hardly tell was not out of an old Rolls-Royce, apart from the bits where we got a bit careless with the spray glue and we will have to try and get it off tomorrow.
It was a lovely time. There is a nest of baby birds in the corner of the shed, not the ones that the owl might have eaten, some others. I am very glad that fate made me a person and not a mummy bird, because their incessant hungry tweeting would have driven me around the bend. They are not my problem, and I was still holding my breath for the moment when they would shut up and go to sleep.
We did wonder if they have got a cuckoo in there, we have got several cuckoos around the shed. I know that cuckoos are wicked and idle, but they make a lovely noise. There was a young cuckoo today, trying out its call for the first time. It took ages for it to get it right, which made us laugh, it is impossible to describe the liquid sound of a cuckoo trying out a range of wrong notes. They are jolly big, when they fly past they seem huge. No wonder the poor little finches struggle so badly when they have got one interloping in their nest.
Once the dashboard was suitably enveloped Mark had got to rebuild the little chimneys for the water heaters. The one we have had has been broken for ages, and so the gas keeps going out. Obviously we have got two water heaters now, because Mark rescued a second one out of a scrap caravan in Scotland: but as luck would have it the other little chimney was broken as well. We thought that we would buy some new ones on the Internet, but when we looked even a second hand one was forty pounds.
Hence he has been painstakingly gluing bits of chimney together, and fixing them to bits of aluminium so that they work just like new ones again. It was a terrifically fiddly job but we thought that it was a lot better than driving taxis up and down the hill for three pounds a mile, that is a lot of miles for a new chimney.
We staggered back home in the end for wine and pasta and to tidy our lives up a bit. There was a certificate in the post from Oliver’s school telling us that he has been trying hard, and an e-mail from Lucy telling us dolefully that she thinks she has messed up her Chemistry GCSE.
Also there was an email from my uncle, which made me laugh a great deal, with a picture which I have included above. It is a picture of a mug which I gave him for Christmas when I was about seven, and which he has used at work every single day since. It has survived all this time. I am almost fifty two.
Never has a present been appreciated for such a long time.
All the same, my tastes have changed a bit since then.
