Do not be troubled

Warning: Some readers may find this troubling.

…most especially my mother, who does not at all like the idea that I might be using Mark’s dodgy circular saw to cut up firewood.

Let me say now to forestall any potential alarm, that I still have all of my fingers, and no injuries more serious than having had sawdust blow in my eye when a bit of a breeze got up, and a sore toe after I accidentally dropped a scaffolding plank on it. This made me hop about and swear.

In any case, under the circumstances I didn’t have very much choice.

Mark was at work today, and whilst the dogs and I were having a long and windy hike up to the top of the fell, the builders across the road very kindly dumped an enormous stack of scrap timber for us.

It was perfect firewood. It was dry, and in easily-managed lengths. The only problem with it was that there was so much of it that had I tried to stack it all in the back yard there would have been no room for Mark to come home from work.

It is not cricket to leave huge piles of scrap timber cluttering up the alley. Of course the alley at the back of our house is not really part of Visit England’s tourist trail, even in the days when the Lake District had tourists in it. Also it has never been declared a site of Outstanding Natural Beauty, most especially not since the starlings raided the dustbin at the back of the Indian restaurant and spread red table napkins and onion peel everywhere.

All the same it is still an old-fashioned terrace of Lakeland slate cottages, and everybody who walks past on their holidays from Birmingham or Wigan sighs enviously

Therefore, despite its grey and mildly unlovely aspect, it is not all right to fill it with scruffy heaps of firewood.

Since it was already filled with firewood, being my firewood, I felt morally obliged to do something about it.

Fortunately it was not actually raining.

Lucy had buzzed off to Number One Son-In-Law’s house, to go and finish off some tiling that they had started yesterday, and so I was on my own.

I dragged the saw out and balanced it on the top of the dustbin, and dragged the wood in.

It took all day.

I do not at all like using the dodgy upside-down circular saw. I am so frightened of it that I do not even like walking past it when it is not plugged in. It is not at all easy to force bits of floorboard past the saw blade with a stick when you are standing at a good metre’s distance, with everything clenched to run away should the saw blade escape from the dustbin and come chasing after me.

Mark has explained why this cannot ever happen, but we are living in a world where all sorts of hitherto unimaginable things are happening. Therefore I do not trust any probability just because it is completely and utterly impossible. This time last year I would have laughed to scorn the idea that Oliver Cromwell would have undergone a second resurrection and returned to deprive us of singing, dancing and Christmas carol concerts, but here we are anyway. You just never can tell any more. Nothing can be relied upon.

I did not, as you already know, accidentally amputate any bits of me, and by half past three I was looking with satisfaction at a wood pile stacked to my eye level, and yet more piled up in the house.

I remembered at this point that I had forgotten breakfast, and was suddenly, ravenously hungry.

It had made my hands itch like mad. I am allergic to something that lives in sawdust, and my fingers were starting to look like bright pink Cumberland sausages. I had to take an anti-histamine before I could do anything very useful.

Obviously I have got gloves, but equally obviously, had forgotten that I would need them.

When Mark came home he was very pleased indeed. Instead of sawing up firewood he could spend his evening hanging the Christmas lights in the living room. I know that it is not Christmas, but today has been such a grim, twilight, greasy sort of day that I thought we needed some happiness, and was busy digging them out as he came home.

He is pinning them to the curtain pelmets as I write to you.

Have a picture.