Mark has arranged some days of not installing rural broadband.
Partly this is because they have installed everything that they have got, and until the new order of rural broadband technical supplies arrives, which it hasn’t yet, they have not got very much left to put into places. Of course Mark could occupy himself perfectly well doing repairs and maintenance and climbing up aerial poles, but he has decided not to, because his taxi needs an MOT.
His taxi has been sadly neglected for quite some time, and Mark had become worried about its general roadworthiness. He decided that in order to preserve the safety of himself, his passengers and the general public, it would be necessary to jack it up and spend some time lying underneath it, swearing, and today that is exactly what he did.
Of course once he got underneath it and started bashing things about, he discovered that nothing was quite as bad as he was expecting it to be, and that in fact it would not take weeks and weeks of trapped fingers and dropped spanners, but a day or two would sort it out.
He ordered some bits from Autoparts, which won’t get here until tomorrow, so he is going to have to take tomorrow off as well. He would have probably had to do this anyway, because he has been busy all day and he has not finished yet. This is all right. It feels brilliant to be making things all right again.
I have also been making things all right again.
I have felt desperately weary for weeks and weeks, and this morning woke up feeling all right. All right, that is, apart from a mild hangover brought about by having a bedtime glass of our own Chateau Windermere wine with Number Two Daughter and Mrs. Number Two Daughter last night. This, as you might recall, is the wine made from our own garden grapes by Harry’s dad, who is an amateur winemaker. It is all right as long as you are already drunk when you start drinking it. If you drink it first then it is quite horribly shocking. The problem was that we had run out of alternatives, and it was there. We made a collective family decision this morning that we would not make that mistake again.
Anyway, for the first time in ages I actually thought that I would like to do some housework things to make life feel nice. Obviously I do a lot of housework things all the time, but just lately I haven’t much wanted to do them, and life hasn’t felt very much nicer when they are done. It has just been a weary battle against dust and sticky fingermarks.
Today I thought I would make our house feel like a nice hotel.
I started at the top and worked my way down. Not quite at the top, because that is Number Two Daughter’s bedroom, and I am telling myself firmly that it would be a shocking invasion of her privacy to go up there and hoover and polish things, although really it is because there are just too many stairs and it is nice to have a bit of the house that is Somebody Else’s Problem.
Number Two Daughter and Mrs. Number Two Daughter did not feel the need to have a bedroom like a nice hotel. Instead they went swimming in some warm rock pools near Keswick.
I started with the children’s rooms and brushed and polished and wiped my way downstairs.
By afternoon it was astonishingly hot, and Mark was fed up of lying in the dusty road.
We went to Bowness and bought some scented hand washing liquid soap, and some flowers.
I do not buy hand washing soap in Penhaligons any more because they have changed too many things, so we went to try a shop in Bowness that I have been considering for some time.
You could tell straight away that it was properly middle class, because everything was neatly arranged with only two or three things sitting on each wide oaken shelf, and the man offered us a cup of lemon and peppermint tea to drink whilst we were looking.
We bought some Verbena flavoured handwash. This was a difficult thing to do, because there were all sorts of flavours, and even when we decided on the verbena, there was still a choice of with or without something called shea butter. One sort smelled better, the other sort made your hands softer, and I flapped about indecisively for ages until Mark said that he thought the shea butter sort would be better. I can’t now remember why he thought this, except possibly that it was cheaper and he had had enough of standing patiently looking at varieties of soap. Mark would not notice if I put washing up liquid in the soap dispenser.
When we got back Mark went to bash his car about a bit more, and I went to the library and washed the kitchen dresser.
I was still doing this when Number Two Daughter and Mrs Number Two Daughter came home, and we stopped doing everything then, to have a barbecue in the wonderful hot garden. This was a joy. It is the first time that I can remember it being warm enough in the evening to sit in the garden without a coat on. I know that it is wicked to think so, but I do hope that this heat is the consequence of our wicked reckless behaviour and is Global Warming. It would be lovely to think that it might happen every year, although of course I know that it is not nice for the polar bears. I took my books back to the library this afternoon, and the lady at the desk said that it was twenty seven degrees. We marvelled happily at this. It has never, ever been that hot in Windermere
I checked my emails this afternoon to discover an email from Oliver, announcing that he thought he might perhaps read these pages from time to time. I was very pleased about this, because if your family can just read about what you are doing it saves a lot of explaining later. Hello Oliver.
It has been lovely to have Mark at home and to be pottering about together. I have got a lovely clean house full of flowers and beautifully scented soap, and am feeling very happy indeed.
Even better, we can do it again tomorrow.
Have a picture of my tidy house. It is just like a nice hotel.
