I am on the taxi rank.
I am not going anywhere in any great hurry, but all the same I am feeling quite unexpectedly contented.
I am next to the lake in the sunshine.
I have got a bag of almonds, a flask of my favourite black spiced tea, and a splendid book.
The book is a magnificent epic about the days of the Indian Raj, written by somebody who was there, and it is breathtaking in its intensity, I can almost smell turmeric and incense drifting from its pages. It was so utterly absorbing that I was almost relieved when somebody wanted to get in the taxi and I had to be recalled to the cool green of a Cumbrian afternoon.
I have been to India, of course, although it might have changed a bit since the days of the Raj. My recollections are not so much of the whispers of silk and the pattering of bare feet on marble, as much as the bellowing of importunate taxi drivers, and a smell that we could easily recreate at home if we decided not to flush the loo for a couple of weeks.
I have been enjoying the book very much. Perhaps we ought to go again. I would like that, especially if we had saved enough to stay somewhere rather more upmarket than the Om Ganesh Guest House, which was most memorable for its sounds of other guests being sick all night after having recklessly eaten dinner in the restaurant downstairs.
All the same, out of our bedroom window we watched dolphins leaping in the sea, and peacocks fanning their great tails in the baking sunshine, and enormous jewelled butterflies, fluttering amongst the flowers.
If ever you stay there, take plenty of loo roll with you. You will need it.
The tiles are now up in our new kitchen, and for a striking moment when I came in and saw them, they also made me think wistfully of our travelling days, which obviously were the ones pre-school-fees. The gorgeous blue-and-gold peacocks remind me very much of the swirls and patterns of the mosques in Istanbul, although they were just patterns, not pictures of animals, which are not allowed in mosques.
When we came home from visiting the Blue Mosque we went, a couple of days later, to a cathedral somewhere, I forget where. The contrast was really quite astounding. The cathedral was sombre grey stone, and filled with monuments to dead people. The mosque was brilliantly-coloured, and vivid, and there was nobody dead in it anywhere. If I was starting a religion I think I would go for a spectacular one, preferably with gold bits.
I am not starting a religion. I will have to make do with a kitchen.
I have still not been helping very much. I took all of the handles off the cupboards in order to spray them a sophisticated shade of black. We thought we would add a stylish finish to the cooker hood and the door handles by revitalising them with our usual all-purpose improver of matt black hub cap paint. This is going to look brilliant. I scrubbed the lacquer off the door handles and sprayed them. The paint ran a bit, but it didn’t matter, they looked ace when I had finished.
Mark did the cooker hood. That was too important to be entrusted to me.
That has been about the sum total of my day’s achievements, other than some half-hearted clearing up, and of course going out to work.
My contribution will come tomorrow, when both of the tilers have buzzed off doing other things, and I can start sweeping up dust and scrubbing grout off the cooker. I do not mind this at all. The tiles are so breathtakingly splendid that it would have been worth a week’s worth of dusting.
The picture is the Work In Progress. Finished picture tomorrow.
