I am very pleased to be able to tell you that today Number One Daughter, in her words, smashed it.
She has had a brilliant day of European cross fitting competing and is feeling jolly pleased with herself.
All is well.
I can stop worrying about her now. I had terribly anxious dreams about her last night.
I have not had a brilliant day of anything. It has been a happy sort of day, just not terribly productive. I wish I did not have to keep going to sleep, it is such an awful waste of time.
We have been cleaning our bedroom.
As you know, we have emptied it out ready to be painted. We are sleeping in the living room, and the rest of the house is stuffed full of bits of wardrobe and drawers. Our dressing gowns have to be hung on the bannister, and there are shoes and ties and clothes hangers all over the place. The house is beginning to resemble the room in Age Concern where they keep donations until they get time to laugh at them and throw them away.
Clothes hangers are a complete nuisance when they do not have clothes on them. There is no way known to mankind of stopping them becoming entangled and cluttery. At the moment they seem to be everywhere, newly bare because I have been throwing clothes away, and without a wardrobe in which to hide them.
Once the bedroom was really empty we were able to take a good look at the horrors that we have been ignoring for the last few months.
The walls were blackened with a horrible sooty dust, especially around the windows, overlaid in bits by greasy black mould.
It was awful.
I have, of course, wiped and hoovered this week, but it has not been anywhere near enough. Today we laid down dust sheets on the carpet. Then we mixed bleach and washing up liquid in spray bottles, and sprayed and scrubbed, rinsed and wiped, until the worst was gone. The picture at the top is what it looked like not before we started, but when we had finished.
This is shocking.
It is only three years since the last time it was painted.
Happily, the worst is gone now, and at least we will be able to repaint on the top of it.
We have been looking on eBay at air purifiers, the sort that are supposed to suck the dust in out of the air, and we think we will get some of them to put next to the windows. They are supposed to be for cleaning the polluted atmosphere in your house. I have not seen a single advertisement for them that says: for getting rid of Lake District fresh air.
Once it was decently washed, we went back downstairs and ate a massive breakfast of scrambled eggs and smoked fish on slabs of cheesy bread.
This was a mistake, because once we had eaten, we could not stop yawning and rubbing our eyes.
We did not start painting.
We went back to bed.
This is such a total nuisance. It would be lovely to be able to get on with things properly without collapsing into narcolepsy every few minutes.
When the alarm went off it was such an annoying noise that I switched it off, and then had a recurring dream in which I got up and started getting ready for work, only to discover myself still in bed and curled up against Mark’s back a few minutes later.
This seemed to go on for ages, until Mark realised that the alarm had not been put on snooze, but switched off.
We really got up then.
We still couldn’t paint the bedroom, because of having to go to work, but tomorrow is another day.
I can’t tell you how cheerful I am feeling at the thought of having a bright, clean bedroom again.
