I am on my own.
Lucy has gone off to work with Mark.
They are building Number One Son-In-Law’s house in Barrow.
This is not because Lucy has suddenly been overwhelmed with a charitable wish to aid her siblings in their entrepreneurial activities, although she thought that it might be nice. It is because she has decided that she wants to purchase a house, and so she thought that she had better go and learn something about wiring.
Lucy has lived with us through all sorts of half-built houses. We have inflicted all sorts of inadequate accommodation upon her juvenile self. The worst was probably the French house, where to begin with we lived in one room, heated with a little log burner. There was a cooker in one corner and a sink in another. There was no bathroom. The self-composting loo was around the back of the house. We did not wish to inflict this on a toddler, most especially not on a toddler with a tendency towards furious revenge when life did not go her way, and so Lucy had a bucket.
I am far too inhibited to use a bucket for bathroom purposes, and so we braved the outdoor adventure. This was bracing on those nights when the temperature dipped below minus ten, which were frequent, and made us very disinclined towards late night cups of tea.
Fortunately, perhaps, Lucy does not remember this, and so the idea of purchasing a tumbledown house in need of a great deal of renovation appeals to her very much.
I think that now would be a good time to do this, before the inevitable deterioration in bladder function that comes to us all later on in life.
Also she is looking for a house in Kettering, not some European wolf-infested wilderness, and so she will have access to laundrettes and supermarkets and takeaway shops. This will help the whole project along very much. She can even shower at work if she needs to, how splendid, imagine being able to turn up at work in pyjamas and get dressed and shower once you are there.
She has even found a house that she would like to buy. It is very cheap indeed, which does not bode well for the state of the guttering and floorboards, but onwards and upwards, it is always worth a go.
I do not expect that anything will come of this one, although she has sent the estate agents a hopeful email. It is going to be in an auction, and so will probably sell for more money than she has got. She is even trying to organise herself a mortgage.
I am very impressed by this. I always find it very difficult indeed to impress august distributors of finance with my suitability for borrowing money, largely because as soon as you write ‘taxi driver’ on any kind of application form, everybody immediately knows that you are opinionated, reckless, and above all, creatively independent in all financial matters. I once had a mortgage advisor telling me, impatiently, that I needed to actually put my carefully-stashed deposit in a bank before it counted, and that just a photograph of it in a pile on the table would not work.
Anyway, she has gone off with Mark, to Roger Poopy’s great disappointment, because of course he does not know that she is going to come back. He has been gnawing sadly on his memory-of-Pepper ball all afternoon, and whimpering occasionally. He is not missing Pepper, because he saw her in the park this morning, and hurled himself at her expensive hip with joyous abandon.
She was not there when we went back this afternoon, and in his misery he hurled himself at a passing spaniel instead. The spaniel yelped and howled in terror, and Roger Poopy was in trouble. He skulked along behind me all the way home afterwards, refusing to run after his ball even when I said that it was all right and he could.
Lucy will be home soon. He will be all right in the end.
I took a picture of the park this afternoon. It was greyer and oilier than it looks. It has been a dark, cheerless sort of weather today, and my boots are still drying in front of the fire.
Snow forecast for next week.
