Mark has diagnosed the washing machine’s current ailments as probably terminal.
It is now a simple matter of making its final days more bearable, and possibly prolonging them for a little while longer so that it can enjoy the last of the summer whilst it can.
There is a bit broken off, which is responsible for the deafening clattering, and a rusty cancer of the bowels.
It has had a good innings.
It needn’t think that it will be any less abused during its last weeks, because it won’t. No allowances will be made, no sick leave granted, it will be forced to labour until its dying squeal. In fact, it will be treated as if it were a garment worker in a Leicestershire sweatshop. We will still consider that it is not properly full unless I have to put my foot in the door to close it, and it will still have to achieve its minimum target of one boil wash every day, filled through the open drawer with boiling water from the kettle, because it is cheaper like that.
Heating water inside a washing machine is very expensive. It is plumbed into the hot water supply, but since the fire is out the hot water supply is every bit as cold as the cold water supply. This will change when the divorce solar panel is no longer in an irritating stack in the yard but has been properly hauled up to the third floor and nailed to the wall. We will have hot water when the sun shines then, which still won’t be very often if the currently inadequate Global Warming performance is anything to go by.
We have got to do a very lot of washing. Partly this is because I loathe wearing clothes for a second day, but partly it is because of Mark’s psoriasis, which gets infected quite easily, and which has currently turned fungal between his toes, necessitating regularly-boiled towels. Things were not so bad when he could wear rubber gloves to work, but since PPE became the fashionable must-have accessory, the price of the rather heavyweight rubber gloves he uses has gone up by a tenner a box, and so he has to be a bit sparing with their use.
He screwed the washing machine back together as tightly as he could, and propped the broken bits up, and then got on with his day’s effort. This was to plaster up the massive hole in the wall around the kitchen window, where the doorway used to be. We knocked the last of the loose stones out of it a few days ago. Mark bashed them with the hammer whilst I held the hose of the hoover next to it, to try and reduce the swirls of dust.
Actually it had been leaking gritty dust for ages, especially when the wind blew, and also looked awful, as if somebody had chucked a mortar bomb into the back of the conservatory. It will be ace to have it flat and smooth again.
When it has all dried up it can probably be tiled, and then I will be able to have the new shelves. I am very pleased about this because all the shelf things are cluttering up the worktops terribly.
I did not have a proper day’s effort today. By the time I had fed everybody breakfast and packed dinners up for work and hauled the washing out of the pathetically coughing washing machine, it was practically time to go to work. I considered using the intervening time to make a start on some useful labours, but there didn’t seem much point. It is very hard to get to an absorbing bit of a job and then to have to go and drive a taxi for the rest of the day. Instead I swept up and tidied up and eventually decided that I might have an early start on the taxi rank. You have to be in it to win it.
Oliver has not even managed to get dressed.
He is still sleeping it off.
