In dust try

By now I really ought to know that it is a much better idea to write my diary before the wine.

It is not a difficult sequence to master. Diary, wine, dinner, bed.

I need to try harder.

The problem is that I never quite remember how difficult it is to write anything sensible once I have had the first glass.

We have bought some especially small glasses to help with this process, but they don’t seem to be quite as useful as I had hoped.

I was really very enthusiastic about the wine this evening, because I have had a day full of cleaning.

We are getting up in the middle of the night every morning now, because we have got a boy to make ready for school. This barbaric practice continues even tomorrow, because boarding schools do lessons on Saturdays and see no reason to stop this arrangement just because they have discharged the boarding part of the liability, and the newly responsible parents would prefer to be in bed.

We have got to get up early again tomorrow even though the world has ended and it is weekend.

It is a shocking development in the brutal lockdown saga.

Since we were up anyway this morning, Mark took the dogs and buzzed off to the farm. This was an essential journey because I had had enough of him being under my feet and wanted to do some tidying up.

Also we needed some firewood and he wanted to dig out the field drains.

I had not noticed in our sociable past how lovely it is just to be by oneself. Of course I wasn’t just by myself. Oliver was at home, but he was busy learning biology and Latin, and so I was more or less by myself, as long as I remembered to keep feeding him occasionally.

I did not even have the dogs under my feet.

It was bliss.

I can jolly well tell you that some order was restored to Ibbetson Towers.

You might recall the demolition of a walled up doorway a few days ago. This created a truly staggering amount of horrid grey cement dust, which billowed in gritty clouds through the house, settling on every surface like summer flies on an unguarded jam sandwich

We had cleaned up afterwards, but it was not the sort of cleaning up that makes much difference, being a quick hoover and a wipe.

Today’s cleaning up was the sort that cuts to the bone.

I cleaned the kitchen window. Our kitchen is built in a hole, with an arrangement of mirrors glued around the window on the inside in order to maximise the available light.

I cleaned all the mirrors and then went outside and climbed down the ladder and cleaned the outside as well.

This was excitingly precarious, even though I had not been drinking at that time. There are mirrors in the hole as well, and I imagined myself falling to a sliced and bloody death, but I didn’t.

I watered the poor desiccated garden and cut the grass, going carefully around the flowers because of having a social responsibility to the bees.

Then I resumed cleaning the horrible dusty kitchen.

I took everything off the dresser and washed it. This is a particularly lengthy and dull task which inevitably gets put off for as long as possible in case I die or get a cleaner and do not have to bother, but there could be no more excuses, because yesterday I picked up a banana out of the dish and had to blow the dust off it.

I discovered some interesting varieties of alcohol that I had forgotten that I had squirrelled away underneath, and stored the recollection carefully. We are not likely to have visitors any time soon, and so maybe one evening we will have a Self Indulgence party.

I washed the walls and the shelves and the pictures and the clock, and scrubbed until my hands were sore. When Mark came home the kitchen gleamed.

He was quiet when he looked at it, and poured some wine.

I was pleased about the wine, because domestic labour is wearisome and depressing.

We sat down in the lovely conservatory and he explained that he had fixed his sander for the very purpose of sanding the new kitchen floor down tomorrow.

There will be so much dust I can hardly bear to imagine it.

I am contemplating becoming a bat flu divorce statistic.

I made the title pun up myself.

Drink is a marvellous thing.