I have finished the octopus.
We didn’t make it to the farm especially early today. This was because of our taxi-misfortune yesterday, which meant that Mark had got to go chasing over to Kendal to take all of the hastily-completed paperwork to the council.
I stayed at home and cooked.
I made another pan of chilli for us, and some meatballs in tomato sauce for Oliver.
The tomato sauce presented a challenge and involved me making sure that he was not within noticing range.
In order to make sure that he did not get scurvy I chucked lots of vegetables into the blender and secretly added them to the sauce. Without his knowledge today he has consumed carrot, celery, parsnip and onions, obviously as well as the tomatoes. I was pleased with this health-giving manoeuvre, which has restored my confidence in myself as a jolly good parent.
Do not tell him. It is an important secret.
He said that it was fine and ate lots of it, washed down with apple juice, so that was all right. He even followed it with some strawberries out of the garden. Thus I am pleased to be able to reassure any concerned individuals that my son has eaten a health-giving nutritionally vibrant diet today, as well as a pile of crisps and tuck, obviously.
Mark came back then, in a car newly restored to taxi status, which was a relief, we have been able to go back to work now, hurrah.
It was Lucy’s day off, so we left both children to get on with their own activities and went off to the farm. Mark did more things to the brakes, and we pieced the cab back together. Actually Mark did most of the piecing. I held the ceiling up and bashed in some pegs when he told me to.
Once this was done I finished the octopus and pondered my next steps. I have still got the doors and the bumper to do.
I have not yet decided what I am going to paint on the doors. I would like to paint some horses on them, but this would be awkward due to a tiresomely-situated indented stripe.
You can see this in the picture at the top.
Because of this I can either paint very small horses or ones with a stripe through their heads. I don’t much like either option. When it comes to painting, big is good. Stripy horses are not really horses at all, but zebras, which defeats the object.
Hence I am pondering my alternatives. I am still at the open-minded stage so if anybody has any ideas please don’t hesitate to let me know, although I can’t promise that I won’t ignore them if I have already thought of something by then.
I have ignored all of Mark’s suggestions so far, they have all been entirely inappropriate.
I think Mark is being jolly brave about the paintings, actually. Not only is he a secret lover of clean lines and ice palaces, he has worked for months and months on the camper van, restoring it to a state of being better than it ever was. He has patched and cut and scrubbed and welded and struggled.
The thing is now that whenever anybody looks at it, nobody notices his months of painstaking precision engineering. Nobody sees the ancient bodywork brought back from the rust-encrusted dead by hours and hours and hours of patient reconstruction.
All that anybody is likely to notice now is the ridiculous picture of an octopus on the bonnet and the cat on the windowsill. Mark’s year of dogged effort is doomed to eternal invisibility.
He does not seem to mind this at all, and has laughed when I have pointed it out. If it were me I would be wanting to hang around pointing out the welding all the time, but he doesn’t seem to care in the least.
I suppose he is just nobler than I am.
I will update you on the door challenge tomorrow.
