Note to self.
Dont drink so much.
Actually things are not as bad as might have been expected. I do not have a hangover, nor even a headache. I woke up feeling a bit revoltingly sweaty and alcohol dishevelled, but hale and hearty all the same. I don’t mind telling you that this was something of a relief.
When I got up I cooked some sausages in my newly repaired oven. When I say ‘repaired’, I mean the sort of repair done by a man under pressure from a wife with a tray of raw sausages, but without any handy spare parts.
It is the sort of repair where you have got to concentrate for ever afterwards. The gas will not now come on unless you first turn on the light, and then you have got to light the burner yourself with a match, taking care not to singe your fingers. Regrettably I have done this a couple of times already. Also I have become better acquainted with the inside of the oven, and I am sorry to observe that I am going to have to clean it one day.
No longer do I have an exotic modern cooker which self-ignites at the mere touch of a button, and which can be asked to switch itself off when the sausages are done, if I think I am likely to be distracted at that time.
I don’t really mind this. I have had plenty of times in my life where all of my cooking has been done in a wood-fired oven. This is very complicated cooking, because you have got to be good at knowing which sorts of wood to use when, how much air to let in at any point, and how not to set the chimney on fire.
When I first had a gas oven I could hardly believe how ridiculously easy it was. You just twiddled the knob to the right point and left stuff in the oven for the amount of time it said in the book, since we didn’t have the Internet then.
Everything turned out brilliantly, every time, and I became convinced that I was a truly gifted cook, which I wasn’t. However it was the end of worries about damp wood and the wind in the wrong direction. I can tell you, I am a great admirer of modern living, it is ace.
Anyway, I cooked sausages and boiled our pillows.
I did not do the latter with the cooker, obviously. They have started to smell a bit peculiar. I am not sure why, because our heads smell all right, maybe something nasty leaks out of our ears whilst we are asleep.
Anyway, this morning I took them off and shoved them in the washing machine. This meant that I had to go and get the ones out of the camper van to use instead.
Whilst I was there I swept the dried-muddy debris from our field day out of the camper van and brought all of the sheets in to wash. When I got home I realised that the pile of sheets and smelly pillows and camper van linens and children’s holiday bedding was so large that it dwarfed the washing machine.
I do not at all mind this either, because once I had to do washing with a mangle.
These are quite satisfying to use in an inefficient sort of way. You feed your clothes in through the roller which squishes them flat and they plop out at the other side to land in the puddle of water which you have just squashed out of them. It takes ages and you don’t really have enough hands to turn the handle and catch pairs of jeans efficiently at the same time. Washing machines are a joy. The modern world is a marvellous place.
When I had finished not needing to bother shoving clothes through a hard-labour squeezing machine I went upstairs to continue with my financial musings.
If you could make any sense out of yesterday’s post you will know that I have been trying to remortgage but can’t because the mortgage company thinks that we can’t afford to pay less than we are doing at the moment. This is actually true, and is what happens when you allow computers to make decisions instead of people.
Today I thought that I would try and find a bank which did not have a computer, and hence would not be worried about us paying two hundred pounds a month less than we do because of it being out of our price bracket.
I failed.
Every single mortgage company, without exception, said no, we were too poor to have a cheaper mortgage. We do not earn enough, the mortgage broker explained, to be allowed to pay less. It was perfectly plain to him, a person, that we clearly could pay it, since we have been paying it for many years, but it wasn’t anything to do with him. The system had definitely decided that we could not possibly afford it.
How nice it must have been to live in the olden days. In a better, simpler world before complicated computers.
How easy it must have been.
I haven’t taken a picture, not even of the boiled pillows.
Have a picture of the beach instead.
