Short entry tonight. I am late getting around to it, and very definitely ready for bed.
I have been occupied by talking to estate agents. Obviously we are not moving house. I like this house, even despite the mess in the back yard and the half-purple kitchen ceiling. It is tall and thin, which is something I would have liked to be myself, and it is very handy for the post office and the ironmonger.
The person who is moving house is Lucy.
By the end of September she will be gone. She will have flown out of the nest and flapped off into a thrilling new life.
She needs a nest of her own, and we think that we might have found one.
It is a tiny terraced house not far from Northamptonshire police station. It has got a bath and a bedroom and another bedroom which is too small for somebody modern to sleep in so it has to be called an office, but it will be fine for Oliver if he goes down to visit her.
We are waiting for the estate agent to ring us back. He has sent an email to the landlord, and if the landlord thinks that she is an acceptable tenant then we will put the deposit down tomorrow.
I spoke to him this morning, and then Lucy rang him herself so that he would note her public-school accent and feel reassured that she was not going to open a tattoo parlour with a sideline of a crack den. He did not tell her to get lost, or anything, so we have got our fingers crossed.
It is very strange to think of Lucy being a real grown up. I have only just started to be one myself.
Once we had rehoused Lucy we went shopping.
This was not very exciting. Mark needed some stainless steel plumbing fittings which he could not get, so he has borrowed a threading tool from his friend Ted, and he is going to make his own.
I wanted some coffee and the sort of shopping which includes washing powder and custard powder.
We bought all of that.
When we got home we were frozen and tired. I had made the mistake of thinking that because it was June, two jumpers would be enough, but they weren’t. Even Mark was cold, and he never gets cold.
When we got home we had tea and biscuits, which warmed Mark up because, as he explained, his body burns chocolate biscuits for fuel to keep it going. My body just saved mine for later, neatly stored on my bottom, and I was still shivering even after half an hour, so we lit the fire.
It was such a relief to be warm that we kept piling wood on it all evening. My feet are warm at last now, in that hot-achy way that you get when you have had snow down your wellingtons. I know that it is wicked to secretly long for global warming, but just a little bit, in the Lake District, would be lovely. It is so cold today that the grape vine in the garden has wilted. Its roots are sodden and there is a chill wind, and it is drooping piteously.
I wish that the sun would shine. Especially I wish it for tomorrow, when my friend is coming from Australia. Whenever I have seen pictures of her house the sun is always shining. If it shone here then they would hardly notice the peeling paintwork and the bits of conservatory lying about all over the place. They would look at the sun and think what a lovely place it is. People do that. It is like baking bread when you are trying to sell your house and don’t want people to notice the cracks in the wall where the windows are about to fall out.
There picture is my newly-invented home made teabags hanging up to dry on the kitchen windowsill in front of Mark’s newly-invented light collector.
I didn’t have another picture.
