We are so very close to being the owners of a functional camper van.
Despite this we are still a million miles away.
We sat in bed this morning making a Complete And Exhaustive list of all the things we still needed to do to it.
This took up a whole sheet of A4, with two columns.
When we got to the farm we stuck the list under the windscreen wiper as a handy aide memoire, and got on with things.
Of course what actually happened was that we did dozens of things that needed doing but which we had forgotten to put on the list, so by the end of the day we were disappointed to realise that we could hardly cross anything off at all. There were some things that we had started but not finished, but you can’t exactly cross half of a job off, so they had to stay unsatisfactorily on the list, looking like failures.
I hung curtains and we put the children’s mattresses down. Their little bed cabins are now almost finished, and certainly usable, and we felt very pleased with ourselves.
We had a celebratory cup of tea, and then I had a brain wave.
During our redesigning part of the project we had thought that we would move our eating and living area to a little space underneath Lucy’s new bunk bed, but I have long felt vaguely uneasy about this idea. It is not tall enough to stand up and not as comfortably bright as the nice living area at the other end.
I thought that we should keep the living area that we have got, because we like it, and turn the bit under the bunk into a bedroom instead.
Obviously this was a new idea, and needed some serious thinking about. It is a very small space.
Once we had thought about it a bit we had to try it to see if we would fit.
This made us laugh a lot, because of it being ridiculous to pretend to be in bed in the middle of the day with all of your work clothes on, and of course it turned into something of a brawl. The dogs joined in. In the end it was not at all a sober considered measuring attempt, and we are going to have to go back and do it properly tomorrow.
We thought that we did fit in to it, probably, if a little snugly. We tried our heads at either end, and chose our favourite, and then rescued a quilt to see how that might work.
It is very narrow. It is not the sort of space in which you could have a satisfactory sulk. Fortunately I am the only one of us who sulks, and I don’t do it very often, partly because I am a cold-blooded sort of person, especially my feet, and so it is generally in my interest to be friends with Mark, who has all the glowing radiance of a marathon runner on the twenty fifth mile. In any case we tend to sleep in a shared bad-for-your-back hollow in the middle of the bed, so we thought perhaps it would be all right.
We thought we could hang a curtain and put an edge on it to stop anybody falling out, and we would have an entirely splendid, if compulsorily sociable sleeping arrangement. The dogs will not be allowed in it at all, not under any circumstances. We will store our washing underneath it and they can sleep on that. They seem to like washing, especially socks.
The difficulty is that it will be the wrong size for our mattress.
We thought carefully about this at work tonight, and decided that it can’t be that difficult to make a mattress, and so tomorrow we will have a go. We will not be making a mattress from scratch, obviously. We will see if we can restructure the wrong-sized one that we have got. If we cut a bit off carefully we can probably glue it back together.
I have never made a mattress before and I am looking forward to it. It will be a new challenge.
I will let you know how we go on. What an exciting life it is.
