Floored

I am absolutely exhausted.

This is because we have had a day off.

It has been a proper day off, not the usual kind with only one sort of going to work in it. It started when we finished work last night at half past ten, and will carry on until we have got to get up tomorrow morning when Mark will set off again to bring the mighty Internet to somewhere rural.

It was important to have a day off, even though we did not earn any money in it. This was because we have barely seen one another for ages, and we wanted to put the floor down in the kitchen.

It isn’t exactly in the new kitchen, which has already got a wooden floor made of bits and pieces of interesting scrap timber.

It is the bit of house that goes around the kitchen, from the back door to the living room, and we are covering it in cork.

We have had the cork hanging around for ages, in enormous irritating boxes that somehow got in the way even if you were in another room.

I have been looking at it dubiously wondering if there would be enough. As I write now Mark is putting the bits down that go under the fridge. It is almost bedtime and we have not yet finished. I will let you know, I hope, before the end, how it worked out.

We have not finished yet, even though it is fast approaching the middle of the night, because we were late starting.

We did not get up late. Virtuously, we set the alarm just as usual and although admittedly we cheated a bit by pressing the snooze button once and having ten minutes extra, apart from that the day started just like all of the others.

The thing was that when we had emptied the dogs we thought that we would have a look at the new living-room-to-be and see how the furniture would fit in it.

As you know, the furniture has been stored in a huge pile in the corner of it, almost reaching the ceiling, with legs sticking out everywhere and stray coats piled on the top.

Today we got it down and arranged it in the living room to see how it looked.

We discovered that it looked rather like an overcrowded antique shop, the sort where you hardly dare to move in case you knock something off.

We stood and looked at it for some time, speculatively.

Clearly there was no room for a television, not unless we put it on the ceiling.

Something had to go.

Actually lots of somethings had to go, including the table and chairs, which are going to have to stay in the conservatory, and the coffee table, because there would not have been room to walk around it and we would have had to climb over it to reach the sofa. We did not throw it away. We are saving it in the loft in case Lucy wants it when she buys a house. I hope nobody wants to come and visit us before then, because there is no room for a person in the loft at the moment. It is full of everything that we have not put in the living room, like the coffee table and the grandfather clock.

Obviously we are going to put the grandfather clock back. It is just there to be out of the way until we have finished throwing paint about and pulling floors up.

We dragged things up the three flights of stairs to the loft and then emptied the cupboard under the stairs. We had got to do this because it also needed the new floor in it.

Once we had made a huge mess we took the old carpet up.

Here is some advice. Carpets are not improved by owning incontinent poopies and a leaky fridge.

We do not have incontinent poopies any more, obviously, however their presence could still be detected. It was a bit like being a scientist drilling into antarctic ice. We could tell a great deal about things that had happened in the long-distant past, because they had left their mark on the hessian-backed fabric of time.

It turned out that the fridge was still leaking. We dragged it out and took the back off it, yet again.

Mark thinks that he has really fixed it this time.

After that I painted the ceiling whilst Mark fitted the floor. These activities turned out not to be exactly compatible, but we bashed on, and it turned out all right. We listened to George Orwell’s 1984 whilst we worked, which is a brilliant, although cheerless, story, and which, years ago, provided the first impulse for me not to own a television.

It is a grim prediction. How glad I am that we do not live in a world where the leaders make statistics up to suit themselves and where people are not afraid that their neighbours might tell tales about them to the police. How ghastly to be resigned and accustomed to shortages, or to attend dreadful on-screen fitness sessions, and not to be able to get decent medical treatment for debilitating problems.

How jolly lucky we all are.

We like the cork floor very much.

He hasn’t finished yet.