We woke to the sort of fragile mist that comes after rain and before a stonkingly-hot day, which was happened.
After all the rain, today’s sunshine was the warmest and most cheering of the year so far. I know that May is not yet out, but I cast my vest halfway through the morning, call me reckless if you like. We took the dogs out with hardly any coats on at all, and even peeled off our jerseys before we had gone halfway.
The park was full of our morning social dogs, and we hung about and chatted, in a socially-distanced but still illegal, even though nobody cares quite so much any more, sort of way. I will miss this when it is all over. We have been far more community minded since the Government decided that we were not allowed to have friends, perhaps we are just secret rebels. Our morning dog walks are the major event in our social calendar, and we like them very much.
I wanted to tell you about the hawthorn tree on the park. It is dripping with creamy blossom, and as we walked underneath it this morning there were so many bees in it that the whole tree was buzzing, we could hear it from about twenty yards away. It was so buzzy that at first I thought there must be a swarm, and hung around looking up for one in case we could capture it, a swarm of bees in May being worth a load of hay, as the saying goes. We don’t have a beehive at the moment, but we would have jolly well come up with something if we had found a swarm.
In the end there wasn’t a swarm, just hundreds and hundreds of bees burrowing into the blossom. The world is a lovely place at the moment.
We strolled back contentedly, breathing in warm air loaded with the scents of mown grass and hawthorn, and did not mind in the least that we are not allowed to go to work at the moment. We had cheese on toast for breakfast, because it is still like a holiday, and had to restrain the pumpkin plant again. This is currently trying to escape out of the roof windows, I will try and remember to take a photograph tomorrow, and then Mark went upstairs to take up the floor to install the water pipes for the new kitchen.
He has been intending to do this for ages, it is what the whole bedroom project has been about. Once the floor was up and there was sawdust and dusty dust and bits of wire and pipe everywhere, there was no point in worrying that decorating would make so much traumatic mess that it was just too difficult.
He laid the water pipes in the bedroom. That was ages ago. He has been helping me clear up ever since.
Today he took the floor up in the hallway.
This has made a massive mess as well.
It has not helped that these houses get very cold, so we had been very thorough with the flooring when we laid it all five years ago.
First he tugged up the carpet, underneath which was a layer of underlay.
Beneath the underlay we had nailed fibre-boards, which were not terrifically robust, and which crumbled into dusty fragments as he pulled them up. Underneath them was a thin layer of polystyrene wrapping, the sort you get in parcels marked Fragile from eBay. Finally there were the wooden floorboards, which we had glued together in the draughtiest of places, and underneath them was a void full of spidery sawdust and rock wool insulation.
It felt as though the ceiling had suddenly become very high up indeed.
He made holes in the joists and poked the pipe through. This took ages because the joists are very seriously hefty chunks of timber, since their purpose is to hold the floor up. Also they were too close together to get the drill in between them. He muttered a lot and swore, and got sawdust and chunks of wood all over the place, but in the end he had done it. I wondered if the house would fall down if there was a hole in the holding-it-up timbers, but he said that we would just get another one if it did.
I painted the bedroom door and talked to him for a while, but in the end the dust and the swearing became too much and I escaped into the sunshine.
I took our stools outside and sanded them off. Then I painted them in a pretty pink colour and re-covered the seats with leftover camper van curtain material.
They look a bit like furniture designed for Barbie’s Princess Castle, but I like Barbie’s Princess Castle, so that is all right. I was going to take a photograph but when Oliver and I were taking the dogs round the Library Gardens a neighbour took this photograph of us, so I thought I would use this one instead.
Note how tall he has become. I fear some new trousers will be called for in the near future. 
