I am sorry to tell you about a small, but entirely terrible thing that is happening to me even as I write.
It is the middle of the afternoon, and I have taken a little time out of my day just to tell you about it.
As you know, I was hoping to get all sorts of things done today, and actually we have made some pretty good progress. I have finished painting the wardrobe door, and Mark has mended the freezer. At any rate, we think that he has. He has taken it all to bits and chipped all the ice away that was stopping the fan from working. I don’t know if it is actually freezing things or not, but at least it is not making a dreadful rattling noise. This was so loud yesterday that I could not hear the Archers.
The trouble came when he turned his attention to fixing the wardrobe door for the camper van. Now that I have done my part of it, his bit was to glue a mirror on the back of it and edge it with a frame.
The thing was that the frame needed cutting to be the right size.
It needed smoothing off at the corners as well.
It is raining outside, raining really hard.
It is raining too hard to do this in the garden.
Mark brought his little circular cutting thing in to the living room.
He has sawn and sanded and rubbed and polished.
There is sawdust everywhere.
I mean lots of sawdust, as if somebody has emptied a Hoover on to the carpet and then done a little dance in the middle of it.
I am not saying anything because I badly want to hang the wardrobe door in the camper van, and I very definitely do not want him not to do it.
All the same I am feeling a bit sad. My pristinely dust-free space is gone. You would never know that for one brief moment in time the dresser was shiny, and the mirrors were bright, and the grandfather clock gleamed.
No longer.
Alas.
Later:
I came downstairs from writing those very words to find Mark saying worriedly: “Oh dear, there is such a lot of dust,” and being very sorry.
In fact when I got the Hoover out it turned out not to be too bad at all. Of course there was some dust, but the wardrobe door is going to be absolutely wonderfully beautiful. So I suppose we are used to having dust in the house, and really will not mind it very much. In any case, the huge bonus was that this evening I lit the fire and did not need to worry about it in the least.
Also the freezer does work.
Also he has put the hinges on the lid of the new box.
We have tidied up now, and everything is fine. Mark went to his maths class, which meant that I could listen to The Archers in peace. I might stop doing this for a while, because of thinking that Shula is being a complete idiot and needs to pull herself together and behave properly. She has become too tiresome to be given ear space.
We think that we are going to go on holiday tomorrow. I wanted to go tonight, but Mark said that the glue on the door would not have dried, so if we went tonight we would have to leave it at home. I am very excited about getting the new door, so we will wait until morning. I had forgotten about needing things like a door handle and catch to hold it shut as well, so we will go to the ironmonger’s in the morning and get those first.
We are going to go up to Haverigg, which is where I am going to work if the prison service ever get their security checks done. We are going to have a look round and see where I might be able to park the camper van and whether I will be able to find anywhere to get water, and all sorts of useful things like that.
I can hardly wait. It is going to be a real adventure.
We will have a new wardrobe door to look at whilst we are there.
