Shovelling

I am on the taxi rank and it is an absolute relief.

It is a relief because I have had a very busy day, and it is lovely to be doing not very much at all.

I am here by myself because Mark has gone to bed. That is to say, I think he has gone to bed, he had jolly well better have done, because he has got to drive us to Gordonstoun when I come home from work, so he will need to be feeling fresh and chirpy.

I will not be coming home until around four, because the nightclub is open tonight, so he will have plenty of time to sleep. He will be daisy-fresh by four o’clock in the morning.

I am not daisy-fresh. I am not fresh at all. I am dusty, and gritty, and tired.

We have been putting a floor into the conservatory.

I will tell you now that we did not finish it because we ran out of cement, but it is jolly close. Another three or four mixes will do it, so we do not mind and secretly I had absolutely had enough anyway.

It has been a difficult day.

I have crossed ‘builder’ off my list of things that I might like to be when I grow up.

The builders’ merchant delivered the plant mix and the cement this morning. Then Mark went to the farm to get the cement mixer whilst I laid the pipe on to the floor for the underfloor heating.

We had put the mesh down on the floor first. The pipes were in big coils, and had to be unravelled, like knitting only with more swearing. The pipes did not seem to want to be untangled, and I had to wrestle them into submission and fasten them to the mesh with zip ties. It was a jolly lot of difficult messing about, but I managed it in the end.

After Mark came back came the shovelling.

I filled the cement mixer and he wheeled the mix into the conservatory and sloshed it on to the floor. This was not as easy as it sounds. He had to wheel the barrow up a plank and over the doorstep and along another plank into the back of the conservatory. Then he had to tip it out and spread it on the floor. You can see this in the picture. It is a lot smoother now than it was then, so you need not write to us and tell us that the floor is knobbly. 

We did this lots and lots of times.

There was a ton of sand and a ton of plant mix and ten bags of cement and it is almost all gone. The cement is actually all gone. Quite a bit of it is in my hair.

I shovelled and shovelled and shovelled. Then I shovelled some more. I poured water into the cement mixer and shovelled plant mix in after it, again, and again, and again.

It got harder and harder as the day wore on. This was not just because I was getting tired, but also because the sand and plant mix came in big woven bags, and it had rained on them. The closer I got to the bottom of the bag, the wetter the sand was, and the heavier it became to shovel.

Obviously I was getting tired as well, but I shovelled until we had run out of cement. 

I was so busy that I hardly noticed the occasional bursts of icy rain, and only discovered that it had been raining when I found out that my hair was wet. I did not do anything about this, which perhaps I should have, because the water has mixed in with the cement dust to give my hair a rather surprisingly solid coating. When I brushed my hair over the bath later it made a rattling noise, and lots of black grit bounced into the bottom of the bath.

I left this there as a later surprise for Mark. This is not very unkind. He does that for me with his toenail clippings if he is not closely supervised.

Then Mark cleared up the cement things and I came belting into the house to do things with washing and to make dinner for everybody. It was not much of a dinner, there was a lot of cheese on toast in it.

You can see Roger Poopy supervising in the picture. We are having some difficulty keeping the dogs off the concrete. They keep hoping to dash out every time somebody opens the door. When Mark took them to be emptied this evening he had to carry them out one by one, and even then Roger Poopy tried to leap past him. and was just captured in flight at the last moment. It would be terrible if he had jumped into the concrete, although Mark said that if that happened we could just leave him there, like a very inconvenient and despondent footstool.

I am jolly tired now. Absolutely every bit of me hurts.

It will be my turn to sleep at four o’ clock in the morning. I am going to sleep in the back of the camper van whilst Mark drives us to Scotland.

I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to it.