Comes in handy

I am sorry to say that all work on the new kitchen has ground to a temporary halt.

This is due to an unforeseen misfortune.

It started yesterday, when the kindly storeman from the builders’ yard opposite brought us a truck load of firewood from a house they have been pulling apart.

There were joists and floorboards and door frames. There was a massive stack of it, it will keep us warm for a month.

This afternoon, when we got up, Mark said that he would make a start on cutting some of it up into stove-friendly lengths. It is filling up the yard. He had covered it with a sheet of plastic to keep it dry, but there is so much that it is difficult to walk past it.

Mark does not like the sort of conversations we have when I get upset about a massive mess in the yard. These tend to happen roughly after a week or so of not being able to get in and out of the gate. The countdown to this discussion had started, and Mark felt that it might be a good idea to try and clear a bit of a pathway.

Of course I am perfectly capable of cutting up firewood myself, except that at the moment the only chainsaw which is lightweight enough for me to use is not working. I do not like the circular saw, and Mark’s chainsaw is so heavy that I can barely lift it, still less cut my foot off with it.

Hence, until the small chainsaw is fixed, Mark has a monopoly on cutting firewood.

When we had emptied the dogs he did not come in. He stayed in the yard and put the circular saw on top of the dustbin, which is his wood-cutting arrangement, and I collected the stack of clean bedding to put back into the camper van.

I have washed all of this, even Oliver’s sheets. I have decided not to trust expensive Scottish laundries. Our beautiful quilt cover was limp, and Scottish, and grey, and I did not like it.

Once we came  home I boiled everything, and dried it, and then fed it through the rotary iron, just to make sure it was properly sterile and fresh and crisp, the way sheets are meant to be.

Today I loaded it into a bag to take it back to the camper van.

I had just closed the back door behind me when I remembered I had forgotten my phone.

Normally I would not bother. Nobody ever wants to talk to me, except Mark, who was in the back garden a couple of hundred yards away.

Today I put the laundry down and went back upstairs to get my phone.

Mark’s phone was next to it, on charge.

I picked up both phones and brought them downstairs. I gave Mark his phone on my way past him so that he would have it and could call me if anything went wrong.

That’s so that you can ring me when you have an accident and cut your hand off, I said.

I had almost finished getting the sheets back on when my phone rang, and it was Mark.

“Don’t panic,” he said, “but you need to come back because I have had an accident. It is not very nice, although I haven’t actually cut my hand off.”

We do not do panicking in our house, so I made sure that everything had been properly turned off and that the windows were closed. I picked up my bag and locked the door properly behind me.

Then I ran home as fast as I could.

There was a little trail of blood splashes leading up the yard.

I was pleased to see that Mark had not done panicking either, and the saw had been carefully turned off and unplugged in order not to do any more damage.

He was sitting in the kitchen, looking a bit pale, with a huge wedge of bloodstained kitchen roll wrapped round his hand.

There was blood splashed everywhere.

I washed my hands and got the first aid box out.

Then I sloshed half a bottle of Dettol into a bowl and prepared to feel nauseated.

The saw blade is a bit blunt. He  had been pushing the wood hard to feed it through, and his hand had slipped.

When we unwrapped the kitchen roll there was a deep gash, about an inch long, in his knuckle.

He had been wearing gloves, which also had a deep gash in them.

There did not seem to be any stray bits of bone, although I confess to not having looked very hard. We experimented with wiggling his fingers, which was all right, so we thought that probably he would not die.

I washed it with the Dettol, and we glued it together with some strips of plaster. Then we festooned it in an abundance of plaster, and taped his fingers together for good measure, so that the cut would not come open.

I sewed a bandage which would hold his fingers together and tie round his wrist. Then I made another one in case he got the first one dirty.

He could not do anything very much after that, because his hand hurt and he could not wag his fingers about very much. He tidied the yard a bit and then brought in his bits of windmill so that he could start tiddling about with that.

After a while he had made the bandage so dirty that I had to wash it and he had to put the other one on to go to work.

He will not be able to build me a kitchen for the next couple of days.

Fortunately he had already cut some firewood, so we will not be cold.

There are some pictures below, although not of the injury, obviously.

I did not think that would have been very tactful.