It is Monday, and so the day for washing sheets.
I do this every Monday.
I do not do it because of the historic laundry-Monday tradition in the north of England, and possibly even in the south as well, for all I know. I wash the sheets on Monday because it is the longest time that we are not between them. This is because we get up at half past seven in the morning so that Mark can go to work, and then work until three in the morning at the other end of the day.
If you can’t get sheets boiled clean and dried in that time then you need to turn your heating up.
I do the towels as well. Clean sheets and towels are among my favourite things. I love the crisp whiteness of really fresh cotton. I like them best when they have dried in the garden, but that wasn’t going to happen today, so slightly woodsmoky is always the second best option, and I hung them over the stove.
It is a small tiresomeness of life that by the time I manage to crawl between the sheets on a Monday night I am usually too tired to appreciate them for more than a very few seconds.
They are still quite nice on Tuesday as well.
I am bursting with housewifely virtue at the end of today. There is a loaf of fresh bread, wrapped in a clean cloth, on the side ready for morning. There are a couple of jars of yoghurt warming gently on the back of the stove. There is a cooked chicken to be sliced and added to Mark’s sandwiches, along with home made mayonnaise, and there is a tray of sausages for emergencies. There are lemon buns in the tin, and parsnip risotto for dinner, and we still have biscuits and fudge and chocolate. The bathroom is scrubbed clean and the bedroom is dusted, and I have refilled the teabags and trimmed the candle wicks. I am a Good Person.
Mark has been at work all day. He has been climbing up towers in the bitter frozen cold. He had his thermal underwear on, and his Arctic overalls, and his coat and woolly hat, but he was still cold, especially when his hat blew away. He is a Good Person as well. His knees are hurting him. I think the cold does not help much.
It has been shockingly cold. Oliver and I walked up the fell with the dogs this morning, as you can see from the photograph. The dogs charged about and barked in the icy wind, and when we reached the top their fur blew backward from their faces so hard that they looked as if they were snarling into the wind, but they were not. They were just windswept.
Oliver and I held on to one another at the top, and there were some big gusts of wind that made us unsteady on our feet. We did not hang about even for a minute. We reached the rocky bit at the top, gave the dogs a bit of Good Dog Sausage, and rushed straight back down again, swaying precariously as the shocks of wind swirled around us.
I have just heard on the radio that today some people have been rescued from Ben Nevis who were not carrying a map and who were wearing trainers. They must have been in a terrible state, frozen and frightened, how dreadful. I would not have considered even walking up the fell behind our house without good solid boots, and it is only a little way and not very steep. You are not born knowing these things, how very fortunate that they were saved.
It is beginning to feel like the very depths of the winter. There is long to go until the spring, but we will have some cold to brave before we get there.
I hope Mark is all right.
