On our way to bed last night we had a happy inspiration.
It dawned on us that a day’s work need not begin at seven and end at the other seven, which is the schedule Mark and Oliver have been following over the last few weeks.
We could, we thought, quite reasonably sleep in until nine and then come back home at the other nine.
This was an all right thing to be doing today, because they were not installing rural broadband. Rural broadband involves being with customers, who might not appreciate workmen in their houses at half past eight in the evening, even if they are mostly polite and trying to be not very noisy.
Today they were working for Number One Son-In-Law in Barrow, building his house.
House building is not troubled by other people’s watching television and cooking dinner arrangements, and can be done at absolutely any time you like.
Number One Son-In-Law was not there at all and hence would not mind in the least.
I was especially keen on this innovation, because of course I have been spending my days clearing up our own house and then going out to work at half past three in the afternoon and staying there until after midnight.
This has made me feel less than enthusiastic about seven o’clock starts, most especially about seven o’ clock starts that come after a night of carousing on ginger beer cocktails and red wine.
Hence this morning we slept and slept.
We even woke up a few minutes before the alarm, at ten to nine, and I am pleased to be able to tell you that I have felt absolutely brilliant ever since.
It is an absolute joy to have had enough sleep.
It is a comfort and a happiness beyond almost everything else.
All of us thought so. Oliver practically bounced down the stairs to go to work, so pleased was he not to be yawning.
Hence I have ambled very contentedly through today, tidying up debris from last night’s exercise in hedonism, and setting my life in order.
There was not much time for doing this, because of the late start, but it did not matter. Not being tired makes everything go pleasantly smoothly.
Much of the day was taken up with a re-run of the Washing Game. This was especially tiresome, because when we looked at our bedsheets this morning, we discovered that they had been adorned with several grubby paw prints.
There were three potential culprits for this. I had been fairly distracted yesterday. You will recall that I had spent the day trying to cook a dinner that would make our friends think how middle-class and sophisticated we were, whilst equally preparing things that could be stuffed into picnics during the rest of the week, and also catering to Oliver’s tastes.
Oliver likes spaghetti hoops and tinned ravioli. He does not care about being middle class.
Obviously I could not give our guests spaghetti hoops and tinned ravioli, so I peeled things and chopped things and stirred things, and failed completely to notice that all three dogs, because Pepper had come to visit for the afternoon, were having a riotous unsupervised romp up and down the stairs…
…and so today there were paw marks on our lovely cream-coloured sheets.
I said that for effect. They are not really very lovely, not least because there is a big white patch sewn on one of them where it got torn on a protruding nail when Mark chucked it down the stairs for washing. We had a domestic about that.
Anyway, Thursday is Oliver’s clean sheets day, and our sheets needed washing, and all the clothes and towels needed washing, and the Weather Gods looked down and laughed merrily.
I do not know if it is all dry even now. I will have to pop home from work in a little while and hope that I can put the sheets back on our bed.
(LATER NOTE: I did, and couldn’t.)
There is a spare set of sheets for Oliver’s bed. This is because he is our treasured little chick. I have put these on his bed already.
I had thought I might make some ginger beer, but did not because of the day being a bit abbreviated and full of washing. Instead I re-boiled the loaf tin out of the bread making machine.
This was not in the least improved by my last attempts to coat it in home-made non-stick, and I had quite decided that once again I had been a victim of Internet Fraud, and had been taken in by a website full of nonsense designed to trap the unwary.
The Peppers, however, explained to me that the recommended mixture of baking soda and vinegar did not, in fact mean baking powder, but bicarbonate of soda, and that I might get a better result if I tried again using the right ingredients.
What sort of idiot writes a recipe calling bicarbonate of soda baking soda?
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Anyway, today I tried again using bicarbonate of soda, which was very similar to baking powder in that it made a surprising frothy mess all over the stove, which I cleaned up, in between dashing in and out of the garden to un-peg the washing.
I do not know if it has worked. I will not know that until Mark takes the loaf out of the bread making machine when he is making coffee tomorrow morning.
This will always be one of my joyful moments in the day.
The smells of fresh bread and ground coffee drifting up the stairs are the nicest things in the world.
Especially when they happen at nine o’ clock instead of seven.
Have a picture of the paw-print criminals this morning.
