Our house is utterly trashed.
I mean completely. We have taken everything out of the bedroom, and it is festooned everywhere. There are clothes and shoes stacked all over the new kitchen downstairs, tablecloths and blankets out of the bedding box piled up in my office, and coat hangers multiplying like some newly malevolent breed of gigantic insect in every corner.
It is a tribute to the gentle contentedness of the lockdown that I do not mind any of this at all.
Whilst the bedroom floor is being excavated we have dragged all of the furniture first downstairs, and now outside into the yard, where we are busily restoring it to its natural raw-oaken beauty.
It is beginning to look lovely, if a yard full of furniture could be said to look lovely, I am sure Steptoe & Son would have admired it greatly. I don’t think either of the dogs have had a wee on any of it yet, but we are beginning to think that probably it would be a good idea if it was removed back into the house.
The thing is that the whole sanding thing takes such a long time. I have been sanding furniture all day long, and still it is not finished.
I say all day long. I should really have said ‘all day short’, because Oliver’s school is having a Leave Out weekend. This is boarding school code for ‘lie in on Saturday’. You will not be surprised to hear that we took full advantage of this and did not set the alarm.
I think we must have slept for ten hours. Certainly we missed our daily morning rendezvous with all of Roger Poopy’s dog friends in the park. When we did wake up we sat in bed blissfully drinking coffee and gazing out of the open window at the bluebells in the front garden. Life has few greater pleasures.
Eventually, of course, we could not loaf about any longer, and ambled outside into the yard, which was awash with sunshine and bumble bees, to continue sanding the bedroom furniture.
I have finished the bedding box. This was a twenty first birthday present to my grandmother, made for her by a chap in their family’s pub, and hence is almost a hundred years old. I discovered an ancient bit of chewing gum stuck in one of the hidden corners. My children were not allowed chewing gum, so the rascal responsible must have been my father.
He told me about an adventure in the wardrobe, when aged about four, he climbed inside it. The whole lot toppled forwards, landing on its front and trapping him inside. He was vague about the subsequent rescue, but obviously it must have happened in the end, since we are all here to tell the tale. It must have been hard work to rescue him, the thing weighs an absolute ton, and must have been even worse with a bellowing toddler inside. Mark took the door off, and it is too heavy for me to pick up by myself.
It has taken us all day. This was splendid, because of the sunshine. Lucy called this afternoon. She has been taken by surprise by the weather in the south of the country. Of course she has lived all of her life between Cumbria and York, and the ambient temperature of Northamptonshire has rendered all of her clothes completely unsuitable.
It is the sort of place where a vest is not underwear. It is adequate outer clothing. She has discovered that jeans and fur-lined boots are not necessary during a sunny Maytime once you have travelled south of Birmingham.
They are here. I can dispense with the boots at around lunchtime when the sun gets warm, and this morning I did not even bother with the thermal vest, but that was because we are having a heatwave today. According to the forecast it will be over tomorrow. I am not completely sorry about this, because I have been out of doors all day and the back of my neck and tops of my feet have been burned to a lovely Barbie ball-gown pink.
Mark has been fixing some of the more battered bits of wardrobe, which you can see in the picture being clamped together.
We will probably get it finished tomorrow.
It is going to be so beautiful.
