Mark has been putting Lucy’s floor back down.
This is important, because it would have been dreadful if she were to have come home tomorrow and discovered all of her bedroom furniture in a teetering pile in the corner, and a large hole in the floor.
The purpose of taking the floorboards up was to install the pipes for the new solar panel, which is done. Mark had hoped to take the tank out and replace it whilst he was doing it, but this has proved too ambitious a target. Turning all of the water off, draining the central heating and cutting the pipes off before hauling the old tank out was just too much of a project to be carried out in a couple of hours before dinner, to say nothing of putting it all back again.
He thinks that he will try and get round to it whilst she is preserving the peace at Glastonbury Festival in a couple of weeks. Oliver will not be here then either, so it doesn’t matter too much about the water. It would be awful if he was at home and wanted a shower and we were obliged to say no.
I have not been digging holes in the floor. I have been answering a flood of tiresome emails and feeling irritated with the world.
We have had final confirmation from Cumbria police that they have got no intention whatsoever of doing anything about the customer who attacked Mark. I was not entirely sorry about this, because it meant I could send them a very rude email with my thoughts and opinions spelled out with devastating clarity.
I made sure that it was personal enough to be upsetting, I hope the policeman involved is never responsible for handing out parking tickets in Windermere.
After that I contacted our insurance for a replacement windscreen. I was not going to do this whilst there was a chance that the police might want to look at it and prosecute the chap who broke it, but since they aren’t, we might as well just bite the bullet and get it fixed.
This has been worrying for a week or two, because despite it having been glued with Lock Tight Rock Solid Don’t Worry About It Any More glue, the cracks are still spreading slowly, at the rate of a millimetre or two every week, spiralling into the windscreen.
I do not like talking to insurance companies. They transfer you to half a dozen different people, all of whom want to know how old you are, as if that made any difference, I want a new windscreen, not a hip replacement.
In fact they wanted to know all sorts of things, like Mark’s mother’s maiden name and how long he has held a driving licence. Presumably when they have finished they make up any shortfall in your insurance premiums by selling a transcript of your phone call to people who will then phone you up every day for the rest of your life, wanting to refund your PPI or persuade you to take part in a short telephone survey. Fortunately they will ring Mark, not me, who can never find his phone in time to answer it anyway.
In the end I got through to a chap who said that they would come and fix it on Monday, and charged me a hundred quid. It was almost worth that just to get off the phone, my ear was getting uncomfortably hot and I was beginning to wish for absolutely anything else to do that was not talking to an insurance company, even hoovering out a taxi would have been an improvement, although I didn’t actually do that.
I sloped off to sit by myself in the front hallway, where I am painting a picture of a streetlight next to the front door. This is to encourage the Feng Shui to think that we have got a bright shiny house, and to come in and liberally scatter Good Fortune and Happy Relationships all over the living room carpet.
I don’t really know what Feng Shui actually is, except that you are supposed to keep the lid down on the loo and put plants in your Health Corner. I read some books about it, but that was in the nineteen nineties when it was fashionable. I do not know if it still exists.
I looked it up then, because I wondered. It does still exist. If you want to be wealthy you have got to put lots of wood in the wealth area of your home.
I worked out where that was, and indeed we do have lots of wood in it, because it is exactly where the stove is. This seems to me to correspond exactly with the fate of our wealth, so perhaps it really is true.
It didn’t have anything to say about huge holes in floors and overbalancing piles of furniture, though.
I don’t need Feng Shui to tell me that this is very bad for your relationship with your children.
We had better get on with it.
