We were woken rather earlier than we expected by a phone call from a friend who was on his way to work and was feeling sociable.
Actually this turned out to be quite nice. Mark made coffee, and the alarm went off whilst we talked to him, so we weren’t really much earlier than usual, and then we had the smug feeling of being awake and getting on with the day when it was barely sunrise.
It was half past nine really, but it felt like sunrise.
I packed all our things up to go to the farm and Mark buzzed off to see the doctor. He has been much better lately, largely due to the massive quantity of drugs he has been taking. On top of his usual three different sorts of blood pressure drugs, he has been prescribed an antibiotic, two different sorts of anti-histamine, ibuprofen for the swelling and paracetamol and codeine for when occasionally it gets too much. Just occasionally he has a glass of wine at bedtime as well, I don’t know how he manages to carry out a sensible conversation.
The doctor noted that none of the above seem to be making him actually better, but prescribed them all again anyway, on the assumption that either sooner or later something would start to work, or that his ailments would go away by themselves, which would be just as good.
Once Mark had been suitably stuffed full of medication we packed tea and biscuits and dogs into the car and rushed off to the farm.
We were full of excitement after our weekend of abstinence, and indeed, being back at our never-ending story was just lovely. I painted the space where the bathroom window used to be, to make it look like a window in a pretty cottage, instead of a large patch on the side of an ancient camper van, and Mark got on with installing the seats in the cab.
This is not at all simple, because they are new, in a second-hand sort of way, and have a swivel bit underneath them. These swivel bits have got to be fitted to a frame which Mark has made up, and then to the underneath of the seat. This is what I think is happening. It is all very complicated and involves a great deal of earnest contemplation and inspection of metal bits.
In the end he finished installing my seat. He has got to take the actual seat bit out, because of still needing to faff about in the place where it will go, but now it is just a matter of a few bolts and not a complicated fandango of sliding and swivelling bits. We tried it all out, and you will be pleased to hear that everything slid and swivelled exactly as it should have done. This was very exciting. One day soon we will sit in those very seats and drive off up the road.
I painted a picture of a kettle simmering over a fire, and a pot of tea on a table. We had thought that we would try and make the view through the pretend window look inviting, and I couldn’t think of anything else that might both fulfil this aim and also not be too complicated to paint.
The camper van is painted with JCB paint, and so it is not possible to draw things out in pencil first, I have just got to go straight to the paint. This is good, because it stops me doing too much preliminary tiddling about, but if things go wrong I have got to scrub them off with a Brillo pad.
I have had to scrub quite a bit off at times, because although I am enjoying myself very much, I am definitely an amateur artist. We showed one of the taxi drivers the photographs this evening, and he examined them silently for a while. Eventually he nodded thoughtfully, and said that he supposed it might be all right if we went to a festival.
We shall have our own festival in it, all the time.
Soon.
