It has been a short day.
Obviously we worked last night, and hence today did not really get started until after the clock had already struck twelve. There followed the usual scramble of filling the washing machine and emptying dogs and feeding children.
Lucy surprised us by appearing in the kitchen in actual clothes, instead of her usual exeat attire of pyjamas, but it turned out that she had a friend coming over for the afternoon. Oliver did not get dressed, merely put his dressing gown on.
We got dressed, and had some more coffee, which we hoped might turn us into decisive powerhouses of activity, but it didn’t. Instead we milled about absent-mindedly for a while, and eventually I filled the bread maker and Mark went out to the camper van.
In the middle of our general confusion and life-reorganising over the last few weeks, it has turned out that we had both forgotten to drain the water out of the camper van. When the weather got really cold the pipes froze, and the shower control has cracked. Mark dismantled it today on the kitchen table in the hope of achieving a low-budget repair, but it is beyond anything that can be restored with glue and a hammer, and we are going to have to order a new one.
Whilst he was busy we discussed our plans for house regeneration.
We think that as well as taking the rugs up, we are going to have to throw away the sofa.
It is a nice sofa but occupies a large bit of house, and nobody ever sits on it except the dogs. We are too busy for sitting on sofas, and on the odd occasion when we think we might like the idea, we still don’t sit on it because it smells of dog.
Space in our house is at a premium, and we decided today that sooner or later the sofa will have to go. It is too much space to be given over merely to the comfort and well-being of the dogs.
Instead we think that we would like some comfortable chairs for the kitchen.
We only ever sit at the kitchen table, or occasionally in our rocking chairs by the fire. These are a his-and-hers arrangement inherited from generations of ancient Cumbrian farmers. You have to hang something over the back when you sit in them or there is a draught, and sometimes I stub my toes on the rocker bits, but apart from that we like them, and they fulfill the function of ‘comfortable chair’ well enough.
The kitchen table chairs do not do this. They are elderly and creaky and you have to sit down carefully in order not to prompt an unexpected collapse. Also they are so uncomfortable that even the dogs avoid them. These are the only features that they share. Apart from that they resemble one another no more than a Yorkshire Terrier resembles a Jersey cow and a rhinoceros and an alpaca. They have all got four legs and you have to take great care when sitting on any of them.
Our late New Year Resolution is to save up for some new chairs.
We are going to make our house functional and free of clutter.
I can hardly wait.
