We have performed our duty as responsible democratic citizens and voted.
I am very much looking forward to it being over. We stopped listening to the radio a couple of weeks ago, apart from The Archers and the splendid dramatisation of Pygmalion on Saturday night.
I have been very glad indeed for the last few weeks that we don’t have a television. The radio in the taxi has been quite bad enough, a gloomy combination of dull and irritating, not to mention the inevitable harangues which have been filling social media. All of them seem to have been promising apocalypse whoever gets in.
I am not excessively concerned about an apocalypse. My experience of politics suggests that we have got a very efficient civil service, designed to make certain that no tiresome interfering government is allowed to change things very much. I am fairly sanguine about the result, whatever it turns out to be. So far nobody at all has proposed a ban on Cabernet Sauvignon, or the introduction of compulsory fitness regimes for taxi drivers, and so I imagine I will continue to get along fairly well with life no matter what the outcome.
Once we had voted we went to the farm. You can see on the picture my efforts for the day. None of those things are finished, just blocked out, I can’t make any of it look like real stuff until it has dried and I can start adding depth and details. Also, for the arty types among you, I already know that the wheelbarrow legs are wrong. They will need to be changed as soon as I can possibly get back to it.
It has kept me very contentedly busy. We have been beavering away listening to the rain drumming on the roof. This is quite a serious noise in an old aircraft hangar with a tin roof, I can tell you. Also it sings in the wind, which is a lovely sound to work to. It is a very contented feeling, to be absorbed in what we are doing, and listening to the world being busy all around us.
Mostly I like to listen to the birds. Mark’s friend came across to do some work in his van yesterday, and Mark politely asked him to turn his radio off so that we could still hear the birds singing, which made me feel immeasurably happy. A tawny owl came and sat in the rafters the day before, and shrieked abuse at us, I don’t know what it was so upset about. I think it might have eaten the nest of baby blackbirds, though, it is a hard world sometimes.
Mark has built his dashboard, it is almost complete. I think it is a brilliant thing, fancy being clever enough to build a dashboard. It is below. It doesn’t look like very much in the picture, but it is a work of precision engineering and has involved a great deal of tuneless humming and swearing.
There is a bit of wood which sits along the back with holes cut in it for gauges and useful knobs and buttons, and you can see gaps in the metal at the top where the air blows out to clear the windscreen. It fits perfectly beside the steering wheel and over the top of some depressing bunches of tangled wires and loose bits of plastic. He has got to paint it, and then it will be covered in a layer of foam and finished off in suede, and it will be perfect. I offered to paint some pictures on it, but he has politely declined.
We are at work now. I am trying to think what I can put inside the window. So far Mark has only suggested things which are too rude to be contemplated, which has made him laugh a great deal.
Obviously I wouldn’t paint anything like that.
