Give Way

I have just brought in armfuls of clean laundry, warm from the sunshine and smelling of the garden.

There is lots of it. It has been so hot that I have stripped our duvet off the bed and replaced it with our summertime covering of a single blanket and a couple of sheets. This would not be anywhere near warm enough if it was only me, but sharing a bed with Mark is like being close to a small boiler, only obviously without the sharp corners and twiddly dials and so on.

Between the boiler-heat and the glorious sunshine we are more than warm enough in bed without our massive feather duvet, and so today I dragged it off and stuffed it in the washing machine.

I washed everything, the towels and the sheets and all of the various bits of linen that we use to try and stop everywhere from smelling of dog.

It was so warm that every single load dried before the next one was finished.

This is exceptional weather when you are in the Lake District.

Lots of people are in the Lake District, as it happens, although they are not going anywhere where they might want a taxi. They have come in cars, in their thousands. When I went to Sainsbury’s this afternoon there was a long queue of strangers, and the shelves had been rinsed clean of everything. I am trying not to be grumpy about this, because it must be awful to be spending lockdown with three children in a third floor flat in Wigan, but the part of my brain that is still a territorial monkey wants to shriek insults and hurl bananas.

We have not really noticed the visitors much, because they do not know where the nice places are, like the walks though the woods and the park. They go to the lake and have their packed lunches stolen by the swans.

We were not at the lake. We have been at home, mostly, apart from emptying the dogs.  After that we started doing things to the kitchen.

I got cross this morning and told Mark that I do not want to do a single other cookery thing in the gloomy dark old kitchen, not more one thing. We can stay run out of mayonnaise until he builds me somewhere new to make it.

He sighed, and acquiesced, and today he has planed the floor down and made a huge mess. He is pretending that the floor is finished now, but I know perfectly well that it isn’t. He is still going to want to sand it and varnish it and he is just saying that he has finished to get me to shut up about it. He does not want to put cork on it.

I helped. Not with planing the floor down. Actually I complained about that.

I drilled some holes in the new step and installed some new lights. They were not really new, because I had just taken them out of the old kitchen, but we have not used them for ages and they look splendid. They are alternately blue and white, and they go all around the new kitchen so that we will look thoroughly modern, as if we were a swimming pool in an upmarket leisure centre.

It was a bit of a fiddly job, involving lots of lying on the floor and poking wires through holes. I was very grubby by the time I had finished.

I have attached a picture. If you look carefully you can see the lights in the bottom of the step. Apart from that you can see the floor. Mark says that he wants it to be like that. He says that it is full of memories. There are planks in there which came from Hawkshead school. We used to take children there in taxis every morning for years and years. Others are bits of Oliver’s very first big bed. There are even planks which came from the village Air Cadet centre, which was where Number One Daughter met Number One Son-In-Law, when they were both the age that Oliver is now.

I sighed and acquiesced.

Sometimes you just have to give way.