I woke up this morning to the exciting news that an old friend from school is going to come and see us.
She lives in Australia, and I have not seen her for forty years, which is a long time. I hope she does not notice that I have got old and fat.
She is visiting the UK and is going to come and see us on Wednesday. We are going to go for a walk.
I hope it is a slow one. I have not been to the gym this week.
Once it was all satisfactorily arranged, hurrah for the mighty Internet, obviously the next thing that happened was that I flapped about.
It is always the same when I am expecting visitors. I look around and suddenly see everything through somebody else’s eyes. These are usually the eyes of an obsessive cleanliness fanatic.
I do not expect that my friend has grown into an obsessive cleanliness fanatic, but if she has it will not be my finest hour.
I looked around me. Mostly I looked at the peeling paint around the front door. She will come in through the front door and it is scruffy.
I thought ages ago that I would paint it all, but it needs all of the old paint scraping off. This will make a dreadful mess in the flower beds, and would be best done in the winter when there are no flowers, since you cannot reasonably hoover a flower bed. I should have done it last winter but I forgot, and in any case the weather was rubbish.
It is important to have a tidy front door because otherwise the Feng Shui will not come in through it. It will take one look and go next door, which is a holiday house. The owners have got to keep it tidy otherwise people write rude things in their comments book. The Feng Shui will feel right at home there, even if it does have to pay six hundred quid a week.
I cut the grass on the front lawn. This improves matters if you are looking down when you arrive, but is not much good if you are looking up, perhaps I ought to pretend that there is a danger of dog poo or something.
In any case we will just have to make the best of it. Certainly she can’t come in through the back door, because that is an awful lot worse. The back door is where the new conservatory is being constructed, and matters have not been improved by Mark knocking holes in the upstairs wall this week. It has been raining dust and little bits of wall all over my washing.
He has now installed some pipes. He has not installed enough pipes just yet, because we do not have enough pipes, and we are saving up. We are out at work now, trying to raise pipe money, so that tomorrow we can go to Kendal and buy pipes and coffee.
We have been trying to think of things that visitors might like, since we will be going to Kendal. We remembered about milk this morning, which was fortunate. We do not use milk, and it is embarrassing when visitors turn up and somebody has got to run round to the Co-op.
I tidied up and washed the tablecloth. Mostly what I tidied up was the loft, because we have got some other friends coming to see us in a couple of weeks, and the loft is full of junk.
I spent the afternoon shunting things around, with the end result that the loft is now mostly clear except for an enormous and dense pile of junk in one corner. After that Mark pointed out that he needed to get to the water tank in order to continue plumbing. This is in a very handy junk cupboard, and so I had to remove all of the junk I had just piled up around it and put it somewhere else.
Of course I am perfectly well aware that the thing to do with junk is to throw it away, but you never know when you might need a tie-dyed scarlet hammock, or a bag of thermal vests, or a very small set of shin pads, so I didn’t.
I had not finished when we had to go to work, so I will have to try again tomorrow, in between baking friendly biscuits and buying pipes and coffee in Kendal.
The picture is the new conservatory. Mark leaned out of the window a dangerously long way to take it. He is ridiculously brave sometimes. He went to the dentist for a filling today, and insisted that they gave him no anaesthetic at all, because he does not like having to dribble and mumble afterwards.
I like to have plenty of anaesthetic just for a check-up. He said it was fine, but I am not convinced.
Anyway, there is the picture.
