We are on the taxi rank, sitting quietly in a deserted village, having our first small sample of the winter ahead.
It is ten o’ clock, and everywhere is very quiet.
Fallen leaves are blowing down the empty street.
I have been wondering if I ought to get a real job.
We got up really early this morning, really especially early because we had got so many things that we needed to do. We had finished our coffee and were getting dressed by quarter past nine.
This was a bit disorientating, and I can tell you that by now the day feels as if it has been going on for ages.
We are going to go away tonight when we have finished work.
The children finish school for exeat on Friday. Obviously since we are the excited owners of a wonderful shiny camper van we are going to set off tonight. Tomorrow we are going to Bradford to collect its new battery. This is a new second hand battery we have bought on eBay and it is excitingly modern, so modern that apparently if you post them they burst into flames, and so you have got to collect them yourself. After that, since we will be in Yorkshire anyway, we will go and camp outside Oliver’s school and possibly wave to him when he goes to Chapel..
We had organised all of the washing so that we would have clean dry clothes to pack. We put some of it on to wash when we came home from work last night, and some more this morning. The living room is an impenetrable jungle of dangling sheets and towels and T-shirts, all steaming damply on the rack over the top of the stove.
The stove is not lit. We have plugged in the dehumidifier instead. This is not nearly as quaint or charming but it doesn’t need anybody to stack it up with armfuls of logs and it doesn’t make any dust. Both of these things trump archaic charm any day.
We had not cleaned the children’s bedrooms.
We had set the little do-it-yourself hoover off to trundle around them, but it had stopped once when it became stuffed full of hair and dust and discarded chocolate wrappers, and then a second time when it got stuck in the gap next to the loo, where it stayed, waggling its little brushes desperately until it expired.
We took the real hoover upstairs and Mark cleaned their bathrooms whilst I hoovered and changed the sheets.
Oliver’s bathroom was virtually unused except for the loo, which had been liberally used, mostly by somebody not paying much attention, and some unidentifiable smears on the mirror. Lucy had clearly been living in hers, and it had become a revolting swamp of discarded cotton buds and tissues and cosmetic bottles with the lids off.
Once we had cleaned we rushed off to the farm.
Mark plumbed the loo in whilst I finished the bathroom door.
That is to say, I thought I had finished it, it turned out when we hung it that I have forgotten to paint the two strips along the edges, and will have to do that at some other time.
Then I went to Asda whilst Mark put the lighting in.
It was five o’ clock by the time I set off back, I went through town instead of along the bypass for the simple reason that I had forgotten about rush hour. The whole thing took me utterly by surprise, I had got no idea that there were so many people in Kendal in the winter.
I sat patiently in queues of traffic for ages and thought how glad I was not to have a real job after all, how ghastly to have to sit in all of that every single day.
When I got back to the farm Mark was still doing things to the bathroom. We cleared up and tidied up and finished everything off and hung the new door.
He said that his sister had been to see him and told him that we have got to be out of the shed in six weeks.
This is going to be a Build A New Shed Challenge.
We will have to get his digger working. We are going to need it.
We decided that the best thing we could do about it would be to bury our heads in the mud and ignore it. We can always pretend that everything will be just fine, so until we get back from collecting the children, we are going to do exactly that.
Of course it will be fine.
These things always are.
