This afternoon Mark set to work to make a hole in the living room wall.
The hole has got to go through to outside. It is for channelling all the things that will go through from the house to the not-yet-constructed conservatory, like water and electricity and spiders and the smell of dogs.
He spent yesterday drilling the outside part of the hole and today’s project was to meet it from the other side.
We have now got a hole in the corner of the living room that could easily engulf Alice and the White Rabbit, and he is still not through yet. It appears that our walls are about three feet thick.
If we just took out the inside stones we could have a massive house.
There was an awfully lot of plastery white dust.
It had not occurred to Mark that he might be filling the house with impenetrable dust clouds, and when came downstairs he realised that he could not actually see me, and began to look guilty.
An observant reader will question how I knew that he was looking guilty when our view of one another was obscured by thick clouds of dust.
I have been married to him for a long time. That’s how I know.
There was a thick layer of white dust all over absolutely everything, and it made me feel as though either the long-awaited building work or else possibly marital breakdown was truly on its way.
Fortunately we had already taken the Christmas tree down and put all of the decorations away under the stairs. Putting the Christmas tree up is always such an exciting joyous event, and then taking it down again is a huge relief.
We took it down today. There was not very much chocolate left on it. If it is truly poisonous to dogs then perhaps ours are genetically defective. Despite having eaten what must amount to several pounds of chocolate and lollies and walnuts each over the festive season, they are bouncing around with an excess of hearty energy. The only time when they were unwell over Christmas was when they went to visit our friends whilst we were on holiday. They were obliged to eat dog food. Maybe that did it.
They can jolly well go back to ordinary food now, like all the rest of us.
I wrapped the decorations in tissue and packed them away, and Mark cut the Christmas tree into little pieces. In the past I have burned the whole thing, there and then, but the house was perfectly warm enough, and I was disinclined in any case to set the chimney on fire again. We have put it in two big boxes and saved it to burn over the next few days.
I must say that the astonishing flammability of Christmas trees always makes me a bit uneasy. They go up like a Chinese rocket wanting to get one over on the Americans when you put them on the stove. I do not think that I would want to smoke a careless cigarette next to one.
This has not stopped me being very annoyed indeed with the new Christmas lights that we bought this year. They had a built-in safety feature of turning themselves off every few hours, presumably in case you got too fond of the idea of yourself as an independent individual, turning lights on and off with hedonistic autonomy just whenever you felt like it.
I liked it as much as I like the safety feature in the washing machine that stubbornly holds the door shut for ten minutes after it has finished.
I will be getting some new ones next year.
Once the Christmas tree had been dismantled I turned my attention back, yet again, to my work-in-progress computer. It is not properly updated yet. At the time of writing I am still dependent on a very dodgy flat thing with an intermittent keyboard for my access to the wider world.
This is a scary prospect.
However I am pleased to report that I did manage to remember the children’s dentist appointment this morning. It wasn’t exactly a success, though, because Oliver needs a filling, and so I have got to remember all over again on Monday morning.
I can’t set an alarm on my computer, because it doesn’t work yet.
What a good job we have got a handy desk diary.
