We were woken up in the middle of the night by a delivery of flowers from a young man who is in love with our lodger.
They were very beautiful flowers, and smell glorious. He is a very nice young man, and I wish she would put him out of his misery and either take him up on some of his suggestions, or tell him to completely sling his hook: but she seems to be beset by uncertainty. Obviously it is none of my business whatsoever, but I don’t see why that should stop me interfering when I feel like it, so I keep telling her what I think she ought to do anyway.
Once we were awake we thought that we might as well get on with the day, because of having a lot to do. We have always got a lot to do, one day the children will leave home and we will retire and I plan to watch the entire box set of a television series that we once started watching on Amazon, and hopelessly lost track of about two years ago. It is called A Game Of Thrones, and as far as I can remember it was jolly good. I am looking forward to this.
That glorious day was not today, however, and so Mark cleaned the taxis whilst I made chocolates.
I made coffee and cream chocolates with cognac and pecan nuts, and then I made ginger crunchy chocolates with almonds and coconut and fruit soaked in cognac. You might detect a theme to our chocolate eating.
This is an awful lot of messing about, but the end results are so nice that it is entirely worth it. I don’t like anybody else’s chocolates nearly as much as I like our own, which has saved us quite a bit of money in Hotel Chocolat over the last year or two. I have just managed to unearth an old Rowntree recipe for fondant creams, watch this space. There doesn’t seem to be any cognac in it, I am not sure how I can get round that, but I imagine I shall think of something.
Once the kitchen, and my apron, and my hands, and my trousers, were all thoroughly covered in chocolate, I cooked some sausages and did the ironing. It might have been more sensible to have done the ironing before the chocolate, but you live and learn.
Both children had friends in, all of whom required feeding, although Lucy’s friend, who is the very nice child of a freelance jewellery maker and poet, confessed to never having been given fish fingers before. Lucy explained that parental nurturing came in small bursts in our house, and that if she didn’t want fish fingers the alternative would probably be crisps.
In the end they all had fish fingers, and Oliver and Harry had crisps as well. I considered my parental responsibilities to be adequately satisfied at that point, and did what I really wanted to do, which was buzz off to the camper van to do some small maintenance tasks.
This was wonderfully easy, because it is still parked just beside the Library Gardens, underneath a burnt sugar tree, and it smelled gorgeous, a sort of warm cinnamon autumn smell.
Mark fixed the new Housing Units shelf in the bathroom. This is lovely, copper colour with a little twiddly bit sticking out of the side for hanging a flannel. I put shaving foam and razors on it and hung a flannel on the twiddly bit.
Our other holiday purchase was a plastic and chrome thing to hang on the wall, out of which soap, shampoo and hair conditioner can be dispensed at the mere push of a squirty silver button.
I was very excited about this, and filled it up carefully, but Mark said that the glue on the back bit had got to be allowed twenty four hours to dry, and so I can’t hang it up until tomorrow. All the same it is satisfyingly full, and by tomorrow it will be fastened to the wall. This means that our dark days of having bottles of things rattling tiresomely around the shelves are over for ever. What a weight off my mind that will be, how glad I am that we went shopping.
Mark repaired the lock and I rearranged the bathroom, and we swept and tidied and wiped and cherished everything happily. I sprayed everything with a special spray which is supposed to dissolve the smell of tiresome dogs and make your furniture smell lovely again, and replaced loo roll and fruit juice and biscuits.
In the middle of all this the lodger turned up with her Irish friend, having spent a week behaving riotously in Yorkshire. Everything stopped for a while then so that we could drink coffee and listen to tales of her adventures and laugh at Irish stories until it was time to go to work.
We are at work now.
Every now and again I get a job up to Windermere and drive past the camper van.
It is a little happy moment every time.
The picture is me, not being an animal lover in the camper van.
