I do not like British Summertime.
Of course I do not mean that I do not like sunshine and trips to Blackpool and hanging the washing in the garden. All of these things are very nice indeed, and I could happily do them all year round.
I mean that I do not like everything being an hour earlier, and the number of working hours in the day extending to an absolutely impossible quantity as the daylight stretches further and further.
I think my own sleeping and waking pattern fits much better to the winter clock, insofar as it could be said to fit to any clock at all, which I don’t suppose it does really. Also the extended daylight means that there is a massive amount of time for getting things done, without the gentle drawing to a close that happens when night falls.
In the summer night hardly seems to fall at all, and so work just goes on and on. You can saw logs in the garden until nine or even ten at night. By the time we have finished work it is daylight again, and hard to go to sleep with a clear conscience. There is hardly any time when it is all right to draw the curtains and curl up quietly in front of a glowing fire. This is a terrible thing.
Obviously we were very late to wake up today. I mean really late to wake up. We have been a bit short on sleep, as usual, and today was the only day when we haven’t needed to set an alarm, so we slept.
Even by old time it would have been ten to one. By new time it was ten to two, and by the time we finished having coffee and larking about in bed with the children and the dogs it was after three o’ clock.
Nobody gets up at three in the afternoon without feeling guilty.
This is not a good start to the springtime.
Worse, we came downstairs to the most hideously unspeakable mess.
You might remember that when we came back yesterday we just dumped everything in the living room and went to work.
There were all of our things from the camper van, all of Lucy’s bags and trunks from the term time, and Oliver’s sheets out of the camper van. These needed washing after it turned out that he accidentally went to sleep on a toffee pancake.
There were bags and shoes and sheets everywhere.
I am usually quite a positive type of person, even in the face of housework, but I don’t mind telling you that I just felt completely overwhelmed by it all. It was the middle of the afternoon, the dogs had not been walked, everywhere was a horrible mess, we had still got to get ready for work, and all of it was my problem.
It was a despairing sort of moment.
It turned out in the end that it wasn’t all just my problem, because Mark walked the dogs around the Library Gardens, and then once I had separated out the washing, he and the children lugged everything else up to the loft.
After that things somehow seemed to be a bit better.
Mark went outside into the garden to dig out the compost heap. This has been troubling me for ages, because it has become huge and teetering and depressing.
At the bottom of it was lots of dark, crumbly worm-stuffed soil. We have made that ourselves with wood ashes and carrot peelings and melon rinds and Mark’s wee when we come home from work. You have got to wee on compost heaps for them to turn to soil properly, and Mark is better equipped for this than I am.
He does it when we come home from work because of the neighbours being in bed then.
Mark dug the whole lot out and spread the new soil on the flower beds, like a rich brown blanket. Then he restacked what was left so that I can put teabags and vegetable leaves on it again.
I tidied up and filled the washing machine. I sorted things out and put things away, and made everything feel orderly and safe again.
Then I got the liquidiser out.
Lucy has come home with anaemia. She has this occasionally, and has got iron tablets to sort it out, except that last term she ran out, and the doctor would not prescribe any more until she had had another blood test. This took a fortnight, by the end of which she had become very anaemic indeed. I don’t know how much iron measurement she was supposed to have in her blood, but it was down to thirty somethings, and you are anaemic if you have got less than a hundred and eighty seven somethings.
She has got her iron tablets back again, and is recovering.
Since she has got a perfectly adequate diet, at least when she is at school, it might be that she is just not absorbing iron properly. It helps you to absorb iron if you have got lots of Vitamin C. Also I have been reading a very interesting library book about bacteria.
It is a proper science book, not the sort of thing written by long-haired makers of goat’s cheese, so it is safe to believe it.
It seems that gut bacteria are linked to all sorts of things, indeed it is possible to create something a distressed restlessness that looks very like autism in mice, by removing their natural gut bacteria.
This leads to the hypothesis that autism may be the result of inadequate bacteria.
I have no idea whether or not this is the case, and indeed it is a big hypothesis to draw. It is not possible to ask a mouse how it is feeling, so we do not know if it is autistic or has got indigestion or is just plain mental.
All the same, it is an interesting and intelligent book, and suggests that at the very least, our moods may be improved by balancing the flora and fauna in our insides. Having had some horrible indigestion at moments of stress I am prepared to consider this, and so I thought that we would experiment.
We have purchased probiotic yoghurt and some other bacteria-enhancing stuff, all of which I shoved into the liquidiser with some coconut milk and loads of different sorts of fruit. The last of the grapes went in, and the strawberries that Oliver did not like, and a peach that has been hanging about for a day or two. There were some bananas that were starting to go squishy, and some blackberries that were reduced in Sainsbury’s, and some black currants and raspberries and half a bag of spinach.
You might struggle to believe that it tasted jolly good.
Lucy and Oliver have been informed that they are to consume this several times daily. Mark rolled his eyes and said that it was a girls’ diet, but tried it anyway and said that it was all right.
I shall let you know if it makes us all less autistic.
By the time I had cleared up and hung up the first couple of loads of washing it was time to get ready for work. Mark had cut firewood and tidied the garden, and the world was beginning to feel much better again.
The clocks had changed, so we were late going to work.
It is going to take some getting used to.
PS: For the interested, the book is: “I Contain Multitudes”, by Ed Yong.
