I went back to bed this afternoon and slept and slept.
I set the alarm to wake me up after two hours, but when it buzzed it appears that I turned it off and slept for another two hours.
I woke up just before it was time to go to work. I was not sorry to wake up. I had been dreaming a confused and worried sort of dream, during which I had found myself climbing over a muddy gate. The gate turned out to be on the edge of a cliff, and whilst I was busy clinging to it frantically, I dropped Mark’s shoes. I could not tell you why I was carrying them over a gate on a cliff-edge, you would have to consult a psychologist to work that one out.
I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to find ways to get round the cliff so that I could get to the bottom of it and look for the shoes. Lots of things made this unpleasantly complicated and upsetting.
It was nice to wake up and realise that his shoes were still in the boot cupboard.
We had had an early start.
It was going to be early anyway, because we both had doctor’s appointments, in the way of old people, but Mark had just brought the jug of coffee back to bed when there was a tiny tap on the back door. We had got to get up then, because it was our new conservatory arriving.
It had arrived, in the best possible way for an incredibly cheap eBay purchase, in the cool unobserved dawn, in the back of a white van accompanied by two gentlemen from Liverpool smoking hand-rolled cigarettes.
They were lovely, and helped us to unload it and stack it all in the garden. Mark had built a stand for it to rest in, out of an old pallet from the builder across the road, and we stacked it carefully, in the chilly morning air.
It will still be ages before it goes up, because there is still an awful lot to be done first. We have got to move all of the pipes that run down the back of the house, and Mark wants to do something to the gutters and put up his solar panel. Also there is a little wall to be built underneath it, because it will not just sit on the ground. It is the top half of a structure, you have got to build the rest yourself.
It is our Autumn Conservatory Challenge, like a giant and puzzling Meccano set, with a hundred interestingly shaped enormous bits. We have got no idea at all how it fits together, although I think that Mark has started working it out. Every time he walks past it he stops and looks at it speculatively. He will manage to piece it all together.
It is very exciting.
After that we drank our coffee and I went to the doctor’s. To my irritation this turned out not to be a cosy meeting with the doctor to discuss the results of my last blood test, but a clinical meeting with a white-clad nurse who wanted to puncture a hole in my elbow and take some more blood out.
This was, she explained, because my last blood test results had been sufficiently unlikely for the doctor to decide that we would just have another go.
I was not at all overjoyed about this. I prefer my blood to stay on the inside. There is no occasion when it migrates to the outside which could be described as pleasant. This morning was no exception.
An hour later we were at a different surgery with Mark for him to have the same experience, after which the nurse fastened electrodes all over him to see if his heart was working.
It was.
He did not have a lovely time either. He does not mind parting company with his blood, but he was not exactly delighted to have his chest hair shaved off so that he electrodes would stick properly.
We escaped with some relief, and retreated to the tranquillity of our own kitchen for a pot of tea and conservatory jigsaw contemplation.
Mark, who was not especially tired, went off to install rural broadband, and I crept back to bed.
I forgot to take a picture today. The one attached was yesterday, before the conservatory arrived.
