Mark went to work on Number One Son-In-Law’s house today, so I stayed at home and tidied up some of the shocking mess left behind by transferring a kitchen from one place to another.
We have got about half of the new kitchen installed, but can’t install the rest until the new water supply is sorted out. This turns out to be a complicated arrangement of second-hand heat exchangers and pumps, the intention of which is to make sure that we can have hot water in all rooms at all times. I would be more convinced by this if we had got anything in the house which was actually warming the water up. Mark assures me that this will change, and that he has got revolutionary plans for his home-made guttering and compression-fittings solar panel. This is currently propped up in the back yard, being a nuisance with the washing. Nevertheless, Mark is optimistic. Between this and the fire he believes that we will have constant hot water in all rooms at all times, and that one day it will actually come out of the taps.
It doesn’t at the moment because even when we have hot water it lives in a tank on the fourth floor. This means that when I turn a tap on in the kitchen I often get bored of waiting before the hot water actually turns up, because before it pops out in the kitchen it first has to whizz around the house a few times in a pipework arrangement that is like nothing as much as a tarnished copper helter-skelter.
Mark says that he will fix this.
I hope so because he has spent a lot of time sticking pipes all over the place. They are underneath all of the floors and dribbling down the walls, and when the hot water was mysteriously warm the other day, in the end we realised that it was the under floor heating in the conservatory working in reverse.
Anyway we don’t actually have water in the new kitchen yet, hot or cold. This means that whenever I want hot water I have got to lug the big kettle from the top of the stove in the middle of the house, to the sink at one side of the house, and then over to the cooker the other end, a bit like being an Indian slum dweller with a hole conveniently knocked in a passing water pipe.
I cleaned and tidied anyway today, which I thought showed outstanding devotion to duty, and when I had finished you could see that in the end we are going to have a nice house.
In between tidying up I rang Barclaycard to argue about why they might give me some cash even though it is manifestly plain that I will never return the favour. This was actually one of the nicest parts of the day because it involved sitting in the office with my feet on the desk, reading a book about Walt Disney whilst I waited for them to work their way through the queue. Walt Disney was also broke all the time. This discovery cheered me up, there is hope for me yet.
After Barclaycard I went to Asda. The two events were not connected. It turns out that Barclaycard are not at all stupid and were not in the least up for playing a supporting role in my financial skulduggery. I expected this but had thought I might give it a go anyway, because you never know.
Asda was a disconcerting adventure. There were so few other cars on the roads that Kendal had a zombie-apocalypse feeling to it, and I would not have been at all surprised to see a rolling-eyed skeleton clawing its ragged way out of the old cycle shop as I waited at the traffic lights. In any case I had mostly forgotten how to drive. It is so long since I have been in my taxi that everything felt unfamiliar, although I remembered the about-to-be-fatal gearbox whine quite quickly. I have lost its top sign and the peppermints had gone soggy and the clock was an hour wrong, because I have not been in it since British Wintertime.
I was halfway round Asda before I recollected the one-way system, which turned out to be why people were glaring at me. There were arrows on the floor and everything but I had been so entranced by their Special Offers in the doorway that I had not noticed.
In fact it has all become very reminiscent of the old Soviet Republic, in the days of headscarves and long, dreary queues. Russians wore their headscarves over their heads, not their noses, but the queues were the same, and when you got into the shops there was nothing in theirs either.
There were gaps all over the shelves. Fortunately sausages and wine are not scarce yet, so we will live to fight another day, and I bought some truly ghastly-looking wine in a box that just said simply: ‘Red Wine’ on the label, but I am becoming less fussy with time.
I am not going to even think about our long-gone days of Penhaligon’s bluebell perfume and midweek breaks in glorious hotels in York.
Maybe one day.
Mark took a picture of me carrying the washing in the other day, and I didn’t have another one so I have attached it here. I think I look a bit like a Soviet baboushka.
Time to get a headscarf.
