By the time you read this, indeed, by the time I have finished writing it, it will be my birthday.
I will be fifty five.
I have celebrated this great age with a chocolate cake baked by my mother. I could not have been more pleased about this. We all sang Happy Birthday To Me, and I blew out the candles. I forgot to make a wish but this did not matter because right at this moment there is not anything I could wish for in the whole world.
I have had a very happy day indeed.
What is more, we are the proud owners of a raspberry pink velvet sofa.
It is not quite as raspberry as it looked in the photographs, but it is beautifully pink nevertheless. We did not sit on it until we had got it home, and then we were most pleasantly surprised, because it turned out actually to be comfortable. I had prepared myself to be brave about this, because it was a pig-in-a-poke sofa, bought on eBay for a knock-down price, and so I had decided that I would persuade myself to like it no matter what it was like.
To my complete astonishment I did not need to trouble myself with this cunning self-deception, because when we tried it in our old kitchen late this evening, it was unexpectedly perfect to sit on. I do not like the sort of squishy sofa that you sink into and then get stuck. This one is harder and more business-like, and fortuitously, it has turned out to suit my tastes exactly.
We have started to turn the old kitchen into a newly comfortable room. I have been vaguely imagining my future for a while, and I have begun to feel that by the time we get to next winter, probably around January when we have got plenty of time off, my life really should include having a room with a sofa and a television.
We are now halfway there.
I do not mean that I want the BBC sort of television. I do not like these at all, they are just upsetting because of news with pictures and having to choose your preferred viewing from several channels of stuff that you do not want to watch anyway. Also I do not like modern television at all. It is full of smug young people with fashionable attitudes. The last time I had a television it had the world going round in between programmes, and everybody had the same sort of accent as the Queen.
I would like the sort of television where you just watch a film on Amazon or Netflix if you want, although I am not quite sure if this makes it still a television. It is the screen bit that I would like. One day we will have one of these, especially now that we have got a sofa to sit on to watch it. We have got a sofa already, but it is in the conservatory, and it is a jolly nuisance to move it about, we have tried it once or twice. You can’t watch films in the conservatory. Tomato plants poke you in the ear and the daylight gets in the way.
We drove to Manchester in our camper van with the Peppers, and with the trailer hitched to the back. It had got to be the camper van, partly because we like it, but mostly because we do not have anything else with a tow bar on the back.
We had bought the sofa from a family of friendly Indians somewhere in Manchester, and it needed collecting. There were several of them, and several of us, so between us all it did not take very long to fill the trailer with sofa and chairs and cushions, even with the dogs helping. They kept trying to sell us other things that they had, but we did not have any more money. This was perhaps as well because the trailer was very full, and tied up with a very great deal of string, in such a way as to make any passing traffic police decide not to look at it any further.
After that we drove a bit further, and the Peppers bought a motorhome of their own. Obviously this was not just a random whim. They had seen it on eBay and had come to collect it. Mark looked carefully at it and said that they had chosen very well and it was a Good Motorhome.
It turned out to be less good when we realised that the previous owner had filled, and then neglected to empty, the loo, but you expect the occasional surprise when you purchase a bargain motorhome from a dodgy taxi driver. In any case, as great good fortune would have it, they did not notice the smell of poo all the way home, because their dog had jumped in a pond. After this all that anybody could smell was stale pond and tadpole-vomit, so it all turned out all right in the end.
Once we had become a motorhome convoy, we went to visit my parents, who had a set of drawers that we wanted to add to our collection.
The trailer in the first picture is before the large drawers were added. The second picture is afterwards.
You can see that it became interestingly full.
My father had sanded and oiled and polished the drawers and they gleamed. My mother had baked me a birthday cake, and even my brother had remembered a card. I have always been rubbish about remembering his birthday, and so there was some mild guilt mixed in with the pleasure, but I can reassure you that I got over it quickly.
It was lovely. My mother had dug out the pretty china tea service, the one that I have decided to inherit when the Terrible Day comes along, and we milled about their garden and looked at the flowers and felt happy in the sunshine.
Their vegetable plot is doing very much better than ours. Ours was doing all right until the sheep got through the fence.
I did not in the least want to go home, but of course Oliver was by himself because he did not want to come even though school has finished.
It was dark by the time we unloaded the sofa.
I am feeling very contented with my lot. Being fifty five is jolly good.
I am that by now. It is tomorrow.
