There has been quite a bit of clearing up.
We slept through the eleven o’clock silent remembering, which is truly bad form but which I regret to say we have done every year for ages. I have considered it a time or two, but it seems a bit ridiculous to set an alarm in order to wake us up so that we can be quiet for a couple of minutes. I am sorry about this, because I think there is something magnificent about our collective hush, how wonderful it would be if somehow it could come to make some kind of difference.
Number One Daughter was part of the Remembrance Day parade, and I have attached a photograph, she is the smallest one. This is always the case when my children appear in group photographs, perhaps because of inadequate nutrition or lack of some kind of important maternal input during their formative years. I was proud of her anyway, and felt, with no grounds whatsoever, as though I had indirectly made a contribution to the war effort by being the parent of a soldier, albeit a short one.
Once we were awake it was to contemplation of our no-longer-smoky house.
It had not burned down, for which we were thoroughly grateful, but on daylight inspection this morning we could see that our house was not looking its sophisticated best.
Nothing was broken, of course, but there was quite a lot of soot. The windows had brown dribbles all over them where the smoke had turned into condensation and then streaked its way downwards, and the ceilings were a bit grim.
They had been a bit grim anyway, to be honest.
We considered it all thoughtfully.
Mark wanted to rub it all down and start painting, but I did not think that there was much point. The living room is about to have a kitchen built in it. There did not seem any point in restoring it to polished beauty only for us to fill it with dust and building rubble next week.
We thought instead that we would fill it with dust and building rubble now, and so Mark set about taking the last of the boot cupboard down.
This is a tiresome thing to be doing because the boot cupboard was unbelievably useful, but I want to put a kitchen there, so it has got to go. The consequence of that particular inspiration is that now there are stray boots and coats hanging about all over the place.
I collected some of these up and took them to Age Concern. There were some outgrown boots of Oliver’s and some coats that nobody wears. I have been keeping these, vaguely, in case I ever start to like them again and also lose two stones in weight. I do not know what we are going to do with the rest. We will have to find somewhere to hang them up and at the moment I can’t quite think of anywhere. They are in a muddled pile on top of the new kitchen units, which is making me scowl every time I look at it.
I cleaned soot off things whilst Mark made a dusty mess, but on the whole it was not a terribly productive activity. It is not encouraging to be trying to wipe dust off things whilst somebody else is sawing up plasterboard a couple of feet away.
In the end I gave up and got our picnic ready whilst he took the plasterboard to the tip. We re-hung the curtains and tidied everywhere up, and although the living room is unlovely, at least it looks like a building site rather than a bombed-out refugee camp.
If Mark gets some time without rural broadband next week we are going to start installing the kitchen, because it will be nicer against the walls than in a teetering pile in the middle of the room. After that then we can paint out the last of the soot smears.
It is all a bit troubling. Number Two Daughter is coming to visit us next week, and I had imagined a beautiful welcoming middle-class home for her to come back to.
We are not going to achieve this particular ambition. We have set it on fire and demolished half of it.
I will just have to hope that she doesn’t notice.
