I have developed a soreness in my hip which Number One Daughter explained is caused by being a rotund wobbly person who is leaping and bounding down mountains every morning.
The slowly painful upwards trot is not what is doing the damage. It is the impact of my not inconsiderable bulk of flab, thumping downwards onto rocky tracks at speed that is creating the problem, even though it is not a very high speed.
She explained, in the sort of robustly Anglo-Saxon terms that they use in the Army, that probably that leg is just rubbish. It is the same leg as the sore knee, and the sciatica, and all my other sorry-for-myself woes. She said that doing more squats would help, but I have been busy lately and so far have not done a single one.
Hence this morning we proceeded downhill rather more sedately than usual.
If nothing else, this left us with enough breath to talk.
I have discovered that I am married to a man who recognises individual sheep personally, and can talk about their family trees and their ancestors. I was completely staggered by this insight. He pointed out sheep who were related to other sheep that he had once known. This left me lost for words, and a bit uncertain about whether I ought to be admiring or not.
When we got home I went to Sainsbury’s whilst he started to think about the washing machine.
You might remember that the washing machine had been making a completely horrible noise, a bit like a jackhammer attempting to sing a duet with a JCB. Before we went away, Mark dragged it out into the middle of the kitchen, and discovered that the large concrete lump on the bottom of it had begun to smash itself to pieces. In the bottom of the washing machine, as well as the usual sort of damp fluff and greasy un-swept carpet, there was a large pile of depressing rubble.
He rang the washing machine people and ordered a new lump of concrete. This arrived whilst we were away, and was deposited, grumpily, in the back garden by the postman.
Today was the day for its replacement, not least because we had got lots and lots of washing.
The removal of the remainder of the old lump involved a good deal of swearing and bashing with a hammer.
There was a lot of mess. Imagine piles of rubble and washing and tools spread all over your kitchen, intermingling with the left over dust from the joinery activities with the wardrobe door last week.
I was very patient and hardly said a sorrowful word.
In the middle of all of this, Mark’s mother arrived. You might remember that she had promised last week that she would come and see us. It seemed that Mark’s general grumpiness had not put her off, and she turned up at the back door just as he was struggling with a stuck bolt that had cut his finger, and was bellowing rude words and shuffling around in the rubble.
I made some coffee.
She did not remark on the mess, or the swearing, rather nobly, I thought. She sat patiently and watched as he hammered the washing machine back together, and then I sorted through piles and piles of sea-smelling washing and stuffed it in.
There was so much that I had to put my foot in the door to shut it, which made Mark roll his eyes and grumble a bit more. Then we took his mother to see the camper van, which she has not actually seen in the last couple of years, and which she admired politely.
When she had gone we went back to bed for an hour before work. It was not at all easy to get up again.
Somehow it does not seem to have taken very long to get tired again.
Ah well.
