I really think that it is time the country got back on its feet.
It is very quiet indeed here.
It is so dull and quiet that I have been told the same story three times today, by three different taxi drivers. It is the story of how the bus drove past the bus stop and then had to stop fifty yards up the road because somebody wanted to get off after all.
Life has become so uneventful that the first time I heard it I was interested.
This is not good.
I am on the taxi rank, because I am still saving up to go shopping. It is my ambition to make it to Asda by Thursday.
I keep saying that I will never go to Asda again, because they are rubbish and rude, but I will have to because they are also cheap and everybody likes their sausages.
I have made a list. It is a very long list. I have been adding to it every time I have noticed something that is beginning to run short.
I am not going to go until Thursday at the very earliest, because they have a delivery then and might still have some things on the shelves. It is unutterably grim to queue endlessly with a headscarf wrapped around my face, only to discover that all the flour is long gone. Boris Johnson seems to have turned into Mikhail Gorbachev with an astonishing rapidity.
It might not even be Thursday at this rate. So far today I have earned enough for one block of cheese, so long as it is Smart Price Mature Cheddar.
With the shopping in mind I have been preparing my world for an influx of plenty.
I tidied up the cluttered kitchen and cleaned everywhere. I do not like doing this at all. I wanted to carry on making curtains, but when Mark put a tissue in the bathroom bin last night the lid would not close again, and I knew that the evil day could be put off no longer.
I am not going to tell you about the cleaning. It is dull. I recall being a child and wondering why my mother and my grandmother made such a fuss about dust, because quite simply, I could not see it. I dusted things, helpfully, when I was asked to, but it seemed to me to be the most pointless exercise. I wiped everything as quickly as possible, and without any interest at all, when I had to, and then left it at that.
I must have been rubbish at it.
Actually I still don’t have any interest at all. The difference is that these days I can see the dust perfectly well. In fact, I think I can safely say that the ability to detect dust is the only one of my senses that seems to have improved with age.
It was dreadful today, because of the new carpet.
Also I discovered, when I started tidying the kitchen, that when the freezer had been leaking, before it dribbled out on to the floor and turned the old carpet black, first it had filled the drawer at the bottom.
The drawer at the bottom had become an enormous ice cube, with bags of damsons and peas suspended in its middle.
I dragged it out, and bashed the ice off the sides of the freezer. Then I dumped the drawer in the sink so it could defrost. I thought with some satisfaction that this meant I was multi-tasking and went for a stroll round the park to empty the dogs.
It hadn’t defrosted very much when I got back. In the end I had to resort to hammering the ice out of it, and after a lot of swearing, some very cold fingers, and puddles of ice all over the kitchen, I managed to rescue the damsons.
I thought the bag of meringues was probably past saving, and I do not know why we had peas in the first place, because nobody eats them, maybe somebody had a black eye or something.
I put them in the dustbin, but regretted it later. I had got the hoover stuck on the stairs, tugged it hard, and it came loose unexpectedly quickly and hit me in the face.
I managed to split my lip, which swelled up.
How very handy a bag of frozen peas would have been.
I didn’t have one by then, and had to go to work looking as though I had been in a brawl.
We have got a tidy house, though. When I go shopping later on in the week there will be lots of shining clean places to put things.
How happy I will be.
Have a picture of an almost-finished living room.
