The poor dogs are newly-bald and shivering.
They are taking every opportunity to be as closely affectionate as we will tolerate. This did not extend to Roger Poopy in our bed at four o’ clock this morning, which was where I found him on my return from a visit to the loo.
Visits to the loo are becoming occasions for thoughtful prudence. We are eking out the loo roll by making sure that we don’t use it for anything except the loo.
We are not using kitchen roll at all. It may become a vital reserve one day soon, although already I have had a letter from the Water Board begging me not to put that, nor newspapers, down the loo, which sounds as though they are expecting desperate times ahead.
Any nose blowing, finger wiping, spill wiping, is done with cloths, how the planet is being saved by such parsimony. We have got dozens and dozens of handkerchiefs, although not enough, it turns out, and I have made some more out of an old duvet cover.
It is depressing to discover how quickly one can be turned into a reckless idiot. We are not short of loo roll, but my concerns about it are such that in the unlikely event of my seeing any on sale, I am entirely certain that I would buy it. I have not been a panic-buyer so far, but it is wearisome to discover that I am one in my inner soul.
We have not needed to purchase food anyway, partly because I am a naturally overstocked obsessive and partly because actually we do not really seem to be eating very much. Instead we have been buying seeds.
We have not been buying seeds to eat now, obviously, mostly because they are not very nice by themselves, although they are good if you want some variety in your bread and sometimes in cake. They are rubbish by themselves, unless presumably you are a parrot.
We have been buying seeds because we do not think that this is likely to be over at any time soon. Even if it is, our finances have already taken such a massive hit that it will be a very long time before we recover. We will be in arrears for everything by the time the world peers cautiously over the parapet again, and therefore the more we can do for ourselves, the better.
Obviously we do not remotely imagine that we will starve to death. We think that we might finish up scraping a living and paying off stacks of debt, with no money to spare for the purchase of nice things. Therefore we will grow some nice things that we might otherwise have bought, and thus free up a little cash for the purchase of lovely expensive luxury things like Farrers coffee and red wine.
This very exciting project is in full swing at the moment, partly because we have got the hitherto unheard-of luxury of massive amounts of time. We can get up in the morning and potter about all day without the need to sleep late or rush out to spend ten hours of the day sitting in a taxi. It is amazing how much you can achieve when you have an extra ten hours in every day. More hours than that, because Mark is not working for Ted either.
It turns out that we are fortunate in lots of ways. Firstly there is the colossal supply of muck from the farm. We have been digging this into the bed in the conservatory, mixed with our own compost, and we have now got a rich, crumbly soil, warming up pleasingly under a plastic sheet. I bought a tiny banana tree on eBay before all of this started, and we are going to plant it in a day or two when the soil is warm. In two to five years time we will have our very own bananas, and no need to worry about scurvy again ever, what a weight off my mind that is.
Of course we have been doing conservatory-construction things again today. We dragged everything out of it and Mark has been filling in a hole at the side of the floor. I have been painting the bench for the new seed beds. Tomorrow, with any luck, we will manage to pour the levelling compound, and the floor will be finished, apart from putting tiles on it, which will have to wait until we have an income again.
We needed all sorts of things for this part of the project, not least some levelling compound, and milled about wondering how to achieve it for ages. In the end we rang Jewson’s in Bowness, who kindly took a card payment over the telephone and dumped everything beside the gate, so that Mark could dash down and collect it all without talking to anybody.
With any luck by the time the credit card company notice that we have been recklessly spending their money the world will either have ended or recovered.
I am having a very happy social exclusion, but all the same it will be good when it is all over.
I won’t even mind about the credit card.
Have a picture of two home haircuts.
