My current book is called The Organised Mind.
Clearly my need of this is great. I left it on the kitchen table when I came out to work and had to dash back and get it later.
I am going through books at an enormous rate at the moment. This is because it is very quiet on the taxi rank.
I do not mind this at all, because it is nice to sit and read undisturbed. It is tiresome not to have any money, but we have never got any money in January. I am managing this by the simple method of not going shopping or looking on Amazon at all.
Actually that is not exactly true. I looked on Amazon the other night and put an oil burner and some amber scented oil into the virtual cyber-basket. This particular oil is the scent used in the Disneyland Hotel, which is one of my very favourite smells in the entire history of the universe, and I would like some to make our new kitchen smell wonderful.
Obviously I did not buy them. They are there in the basket waiting for me either to make a fortune at work, or win the lottery, or stumble across a surprise suitcase full of fifty pound notes.
And no, if I found a suitcase full of fifty pound notes I would not hand it in in order to have a comfortable assurance of my own virtue. Of course I wouldn’t. Do not be ridiculous. I would spend them all and keep really quiet. If I want to feel virtuous I can always clean the bathroom.
Regrettably I do not do the lottery and I suspect that anybody fortunate enough to have a suitcase full of fifty pound notes would be hanging on to it really tightly, just in case of unscrupulous taxi drivers. Therefore reckless Amazon purchases will just have to wait until I have scraped together some cash by boring but legitimate means. This will probably take some time.
In any case we are spending money as fast as we are making it at the moment. We have been saving up to go to Asda, but have had to put it off because there is no point in going to Asda with fifteen quid in your pocket. In any case we accidentally spent the fifteen quid anyway, because we have been doing house renovations all day and this afternoon we went to the ironmonger, where we bought rawlplugs and some coat hooks.
The coat hooks are because I have made a rail at the bottom of the stairs for hanging our coats.
We have resisted putting coats here, because I have always felt that they would block the stairs, but in the end we decided that they wouldn’t, and also that since they have just been scattered about homelessly all over the place for ages, it had got to be an improvement.
When I say that I made it, you will not be surprised to hear that I didn’t, not really. Mark gave me a plank of wood which had once been mounted on the ceiling to hold the curtains up. This was left over from the days before we set the house on fire and the curtain rail melted.
After that it became redundant, and today I thought it would hang coat hooks on it.
I tried it against the wall and realised that I would have to cut the ends off at an angle. I do not have the sort of spatial awareness which makes it possible for me to see how things would look if you moved them or turned them upside down. I spent ages with a protractor and my tongue sticking out, and still did it wrong and had to do it again.
After that I painted it yellow.
Once the yellow had dried, I held the plank against the wall whilst Mark drilled through it and marked the wall. Then he drilled holes in the wall with his big drill, and put rawlplugs into them.
I took the plank away and painted leaves and berries on it so that it would look pretty. This took me ages and I got paint all over my trousers.
All the same, I finished it in the end. I did not give up, even though it was more leaves, and dull. There were not so many of them and I persevered.
Then I took it back to the stairs and Mark tried to screw it to the wall, but he couldn’t, because it turned out that I had inadvertently turned it upside down before I painted it, and all the screws were now in the wrong place.
Patiently he drilled it again and stuck some more rawlplugs in.
Then he screwed it to the wall and we went to buy some coat hooks and some more rawlplugs.
He screwed the hooks to the plank and I hung coats on it.
You can see the results in the picture.
