The extra hour has made the day wonderfully long and productive.
If I were Queen I think I would ask the Government to arrange an extra couple of hours in every weekend, it would mean we could all do lots more nice things every week. I don’t know where you would take the extra hours away from, maybe Wednesday afternoon or something, nobody would notice.
I might write to Jeremy Corbyn and suggest it. It is the sort of idea that he might like, and it would be less expensive than doing Christmas twice a year and giving everybody free haircuts and paid time off for picket line duty, or whatever is in his current election manifesto.
For my international readers, who might not know, Jeremy Corbyn is the current leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition. He is an affable old chap with all sorts of inspired ideas for making the great British Public happier. I can’t remember what most of them actually are, but they are not very far from the ones suggested above. Paid leave from work for menopausal women is a real one of them, I suppose because he has got several in his party and would appreciate some peace and quiet.
We woke up early anyway. I had a pressing call of nature, maybe I ought to start thinking about paid leave from work, and once in the bathroom discovered that all of the electricity had gone off.
There are no windows in the bathroom, and by the time I had finished faffing about lighting candles I was thoroughly awake, so I went back to bed and fidgeted until Mark got up and fixed the electricity. This was not difficult, being simply a tripped switch. We thought afterwards that it was probably because we have got an electrical socket getting wet in Mark’s shed.
It would not probably not have been difficult for me to fix it if I were not so idle and also was a foot taller, as the electricity meter is suspended just below the kitchen ceiling.
Mark installed it there where it would be out of the way, but I can’t reach it unless I balance precariously on a stool and lean out over the cooker. I hope that he doesn’t die before I do, otherwise I will have to telephone one of the children if ever the switch trips. Oliver probably. It looks as though he will be the tallest.
Once we had got electricity it was an obvious next step to make coffee, and we sat in bed marvelling that we were awake and it was only half past nine.
This meant that there were absolutely bucketfuls of day to spare.
We did not even need to empty the dogs. Mark went over to the farm to collect the frame for his solar tubes, and he took the dogs with him, so they emptied themselves whilst charging about the field looking for rabbits.
We had lots and lots of time, and all of the tiresome things, like cleaning the bathroom, were done already, as you know from yesterday.
I finished making the new curtain for the camper van. The old red one has annoyed me for ages. It was a perfectly acceptable colour, indeed, rather a splendidly rich and plummy colour, but it did not match the others and somehow made me feel as though we might be mistaken for hippies or gypsies or something otherwise disreputable. I might not know very much about taste, but even I know that having a single odd bright red curtain when all of the others are pink and grey, is definitely not middle class. I do not want anybody to look at the camper van and wonder about our middle class credentials, and so it had to go.
The new one is co-ordinated perfection. It feels important to be restoring the camper van to glory after its recent horrid adventures. You will perhaps be surprised to hear that the chap who broke into it actually turned up at our back gate the other day, asking if we could give him some stuff back that he had left in it.
We couldn’t give it back, because we had already given it back to his friend, who it appears has since been arrested again, and this time he has been incarcerated. This was for going into a pub and offering to stab everybody. It is all happening here. I do not think that he did stab anybody, but he is not very likely to be able to return his friend’s stuff for a while, how glad I am that we got all our things back.
On the subject of arrests I have spoken to Lucy tonight, who was in a worried flap about this very topic. Tomorrow she has a practical examination during which she has got to arrest somebody. The somebody is not a villainous member of the public but another police officer, so I should think it will all be easy enough, she will not have to chase them across a field and wrestle them to the ground in a puddle or anything dreadful. As long as she has remembered to bring the keys for her handcuffs I am sure she will be fine.
She is feeling anxious about it all the same.
What an adventure she is having.
