We have been looking forward to today for ages. The weather forecast had promised sunshine, and we had a whole clear day to get on with the garden.
We even woke up early, because of the early night.
When I say early, actually we slept, oblivious, for ten whole, blissful hours.
I felt brilliant when I woke up.
We spent the whole day doing important things that needed doing, and that we have not got round to because of faffing about with other, less interesting things.
Mark put some felt on the shed roof.
He had bought some strips of pretend shingles made out of roofing felt for doing this, and has done most of it in red with a few darker ones here and there. He did this on purpose so that it looks like the roof which is painted on the camper van.
He has left an untiled patch in the top corner as well, which is where he says he will put a little chimney, just like the camper van. The real reason for this was that he had run out of shingles, but it will be perfectly fine to have a chimney there anyway. This will be splendid for when we have a little wood burning stove in the yard.
I pottered about doing useful things. I am starting to organise things ready for Christmas, because when I join the Prison Service I am not going to be here to make Christmas cards and all of the other nice things, and so I am virtuously doing it all now. I will feel very smug in December.
I made things and cooked things. The cooking things was not for Christmas, obviously, because things would have gone a bit stale by then if I cooked them now, and I don’t think even Mark would volunteer to eat them. The cooking was because tomorrow we are going to collect Oliver from school, and entertain Actual Head Boy and his father for lunch in the camper van.
We are only having a sort of picnic lunch, not a huge roast dinner, but all the same I cooked sausages and put a chicken in to marinate and made bread and mayonnaise. When you are feeding people it is important to do your very best, even if it does make your husband laugh and make jokes about making a good housewifely impression on people.
I haven’t made any cakes. I hope nobody minds.
It was too late in the day when I thought about cakes, so I rang Asda and asked if they would save me a tray of doughnuts. Oliver and Actual Head Boy both like these very much. I told Asda that I would collect them at about two o’clock in the morning, which they didn’t seem to think was in the least peculiar. I was impressed by this. Of course we are going to set off in the camper van when we have finished work tonight, and sleep in the lay-by just outside Oliver’s school. This will mean that we don’t have to get up early.
I know that it also means that we will go to bed very late, but we are used to this.
When I had arranged sufficient food for my satisfaction I went outside to join Mark in the garden. The sun was shining resplendently, but it was still raining anyway, and I got very muddy.
I filled up the last of the beds with soil. We had been saving this in bags from the flower beds that we demolished a month or two ago, and. have got very fed up of tripping over them. As it happened, Mark finished building the middle flower bed yesterday, and today the cement was dry enough to fill it up.
These are the most brilliant flower beds ever invented. They are at waist height, so that I don’t have to crawl about and make the knees of my trousers dirty whilst I am grubbing around in them. They catch lots of daylight, because they are higher, and everything in them grows the most massive deep roots and survives even when we have global warming and it doesn’t rain for a week or two.
When they were tidily full of soil I planted the rest of the sweet pea seeds. These arrived this morning. I planted bluebells and daffodils and sweet peas. Then I went round to the front garden and planted the same things there.
After that there was some shovelling to be done. There is always shovelling to be done. I filled about ten bags with rubbish quality soil to go to the farm. This was back-wrenching, and I was not sorry to have the excuse of needing to get ready for work.
We are at work now. We are trying to earn enough money to pay for the fuel to get to Yorkshire, and for the doughnuts. It might take a while at this rate. It is very quiet indeed.
It was raining when I took the picture. It doesn’t look like it, but it was.
Hurrah for the Lake District.
