Shouty

Our ongoing Consolidation Project continues.

Mark has been tidying up the yard.

I am feeling a combination of pleased and cross about this, pleased that he is doing it, and cross that he has let it get into such a mess in the first place.

Between you and me he is probably doing it because of the cross bit really. You will not be at all surprised to learn that I have mentioned it on a couple of occasions. The thing is that he has become completely engrossed in creative building projects, and then thought that he would leave everything in the yard where it was easy to get back to, instead of putting it away. This would be fine if he only had one building project on the go. Given that he is currently in the middle of at least six equally absorbing endeavours, all of which involve a huge quantity of stuff, a much bigger garden or a skip was called for.

He was not enthusiastic about tidying up, but eventually accepted that he is married not to the wife and mother of Steptoe And Son, but to somebody who has aspirations eventually to become a high maintenance trophy wife.

In the end it turned out all right, and even he admitted that it was cheering to have it all cleared up.

He has disposed of his collection of old bits of might-come-in-handy bicycles. I got terminally cross about these when Oliver’s new bike needed some servicing and it turned out that not a single bit of might-come-in-handy bicycle came in at all handy.

We do not have these any longer. I am pleased about this because I had become fed up of my washing catching on rogue handlebars. I am still a bit cross about it because it has been a nuisance all summer and now that it is November I do not hang my washing in the garden very often any more.

He has even removed his pile of useful-looking stones. He has planned to face the neighbour’s-side wall of the conservatory with these, but when pushed for a potential date for this endeavour he was not able to identify one, even in the vaguest of terms, in the next twelve months. The useful stones have gone as well. I am pleased about this because I can reach the flower beds again and they will no longer make dirty smears on the newly-washed sheets.

Best of all, he has sawn up his enormous stack of lengths of firewood timber and turned it into a pile of firewood which is all the right length to fit inside the fire. He has made a tidy stack of it, taller than I am, inside the conservatory, so it will dry out nicely.

I am very pleased indeed about this, and a picture is attached. It is not a very good picture because I forgot to take it, and then it went dark, so it is a bit difficult to tell what it is. I am not worried about this because I have been to loads of art galleries where this is the case with the pictures, so probably I am On Trend.

I did not participate in the clearing of the yard. This was not because I did not have a pressing urge to chuck out lots of Mark’s clutter, but because I did, and I thought that on the whole it might be better not to upset us both. I stayed in the house and cooked sausages and painted pictures and telephoned Vodafone.

Vodafone would easily win a competition for being the most tiresome company in the developed world. I had the sort of conversation with them today where I had to keep saying to the girl, through gritted teeth, that I was not shouting because it was her personal fault. I was shouting because Vodafone is entirely staffed by incompetent idiots. The current confusion over the state of my Vodafone Price Plan was obviously not in any way my fault but entirely the fault of their telephone sales personnel, and had I known what I was getting myself into I would never have had anything to do with them in the first place, and why on earth should I be expected to read the rubbish email which might have enlightened me as to the difference between a Red Plan and a Red Plan Extra?

In the end we reached a resolution to everybody’s satisfaction, especially Mark’s, who was glad that I was shouting at somebody else.