We have had a day of restoring things.
We restored the house not exactly to a state of pristine cleanliness, but fairly decently improved grubbiness.
Things have not been helped by the difficulty that the hoover stopped working about a week ago. We had ignored this, because of hoovering being such a desperately dull way to spend a day: but after a week without such tedious moments, the omission was beginning to show.
This morning Mark decided that it needed repair. He concluded that it was overheating, and dismantled it to discover that the filter was utterly blocked with grey dust and dog hair and vile greasy things.
He removed it and cleaned it.
We cleaned the bathroom and emptied the bins and set the do-it-yourself hoover off around Oliver’s room.
We had had enough of housework then, and dashed off to the farm to inspect the camper van for signs of wear and tear after its adventures.
We knew that we had got to wash it. If you are a forty year old vehicle then several days sitting uncomfortably in salty sea spray gives you a motorised transport version of eczema.
Mark scrubbed it down and hosed it off whilst I cleaned inside. I remade the children’s beds and bleached the loo and polished the sink.
When we had done we still had half an hour left before we had got to go to work.
This was not long enough to get anything done, so we should have stopped and gone home, but we didn’t.
Instead we got the mattress out and considered our options.
You might remember that the lovely new mattress we had bought for our bed last year had turned out to be too big when we decided that we would have our bed at the other end of the van.
We thought that we had got absolutely nothing to lose by attempting some mattress modification.
When we decided to do this we went on the magnificently helpful Internet and found out how mattresses were made.
Once we knew all about pocket springs we decided that it could not possibly be that difficult to take a mattress apart and make one in the size that we wanted.
The mattress we had got was four foot six inches, and the bed was just over three feet wide. I know this is cosy but we are sociable people.
We unrolled the mattress, which was still vacuum packed in its plastic sleeve, and inflated itself into shape with a very satisfying hiss.
We hunted out the sharp pair of scissors and hacked along one long edge.
Inside there were various layers of padding and some tall pockets with springs in them.
We decided how many rows of pockets we wanted to remove and they turned out to be glued together. Mark held them apart whilst I chopped them free. Then we trimmed the padding to size, folded the cover over and glued it together again.
It turned out to be as simple as that.
We were almost disappointed. We had expected there to be some spring welding at the very least, but there was nothing complicated at all.
We squeezed it into the camper van and eased it carefully into the bed space.
It fitted perfectly.
We jumped on it and pretended to be twenty years younger. This upset the dogs, who came dashing in to rescue me and jumped up with muddy paws onto our lovely newly modified mattress.
We yelled at them, and Mark threw one of his boots after them as they fled. He regretted this afterwards when he had to hop into the long grass to hunt for it.
We had got to go home then, which was a disappointment, because I wanted to make our new bed up properly, but in the end I couldn’t anyway, because the quilt cover was not the right size for the only quilt that I could find, so all of that sort of thing had got to be shelves until tomorrow.
Instead we loaded the penitent dogs into the car and went home to go to work.
We were late again, obviously.
However we have a beautiful mattress, newly restored to usefulness.
