Today ended up in a frantic rush.
In the last hour I have changed all the sheets, cleaned the fire out, refilled the log pile and cooked lamb in wine and cream for dinner, and I have collapsed in front of the computer with my tongue hanging out and the sweat dripping from me, like Tom after a long pursuit of Jerry.
This was entirely my own fault for wasting most of the rest of the day doing less productive things.
Mostly this was talking.
Everything started off all right, before I started talking. The day was considerably sunnier than has been the case lately, and I thought, virtuously, that I would do some things out of doors.
I thought that I would clean the living room window.
This is rather more complicated than it sounds, because as you might remember, the living room, which used to be the kitchen, is underground below the front garden. It has got a full-sized window which looks out on to an uninspiring view of the wall which holds the garden up, and the drain. We have propped some mirrors in the bottom of this, in the hope of increasing the light.
Over the last months the mirrors have become covered in blown leaves. The wall, once brilliant white and fresh, had become green with lichens, and of course black mould had crept everywhere. On top of all of that, last year’s now-dead strawberry runners still dangled all over the wall, in an unlovely display of rotted foliage and stalks.
In order to clean all of this, usually I have to balance a ladder on the windowsill and climb in and out of the hole, teetering ungracefully above the peril of the mirrors below. Today, however, I had the inspired idea that I could clean the whole lot with my new squeegee mop.
I have not told you about this, although I like it very much. This is because there is a limit to the boring detail I think readers can probably tolerate. Anyway I will tell you now. It is black, with a bright red bucket, and it works brilliantly. You press a handle and it folds in half to squeeze the sponge out. I have done this lots of times just to try it, and really it is ace.
It will probably be a good thing when I am allowed to go back to work again, I think.
Obviously I have already mopped the kitchen floor with it, but today I thought I would try the windows.
It worked brilliantly.
Well, almost brilliantly. The mop head was on at the wrong angle to fit into the bottom of the hole quite perfectly, but after some wiggling it did the job and I cleaned the whole window, and the mirrors, and scrubbed the wall down.
It was a wobbly adventure, I can tell you, because the mop was not quite long enough, and the top of the wall extremely slippery.
Somehow I managed to be wet through right down to my underwear by the time I had finished, mostly because of some inadvertent sitting down.
I rinsed it all off with a watering can and put everything away, feeling very satisfied.
When I looked out of the living room it was immediately apparent that I had completely missed a corner bit, but it won’t matter. Mark is never at home in daylight to notice, and I am always too busy doing housework to be looking at gritty black marks on the outside of underground windows.
I had just finished all of this when the doorbell rang, and it was the BT engineer.
Our telephone has not been working. BT assured me untruthfully that they had fixed it, which they hadn’t, and then today they came to fix it again.
They turned all the broadband off, which upset Oliver’s education.
I dashed up and down the stairs, hastily installing the substitute broadband, which comes on the mobile phone. The engineer climbed to the top of the pole, and then crawled into a hole in the ground, and then told me that it was fixed.
He rang the phone which did not work.
He came in to the house then, and looked at the socket. The socket was buried at the back of a stack of shelves laden with useful clutter, in a dark corner underneath a windowsill, in the least accessible corner imaginable.
I dismantled the shelves and moved everything out of the corner and shifted my desk so that he could look at it, which he did and then decided that it wasn’t the socket.
He changed the little plug, and then the lead to the telephone and then he thought that it was probably the router.
He fiddled about with the router and then the telephone rang, so he decided that it must most certainly be fixed after all, and went dashing off before we could find out that it wasn’t. He said that he would ring me to reassure me that it was truly working, but either he forgot or it isn’t working after all, because it hasn’t rung since.
I do not mind this. It is very nice not to be besieged with calls about the minor car accident that I have had, or telling me that all my broadband has been cancelled, or that I need to share my bank account details with Amazon.
Mark, who installs these things for a living, said later that it could not possibly, possibly be the router, because it was plugged in somewhere else.
By the time I had restored Oliver’s education, and rebuilt the shelves, and put my desk back, somehow the day had vanished.
NEWS UPDATE:
I have now come back to this after a break of several hours, and we are having a new disaster.
The boiler has burst.
Please do not worry about us in the least because Mark has assured me that it will be easy to fix and he will do it in the morning.
All the same there is going to be a lot of sooty water to clear up and it is going to be cold in the morning whilst he is welding it back together again.
It is the very opposites of poggers, it is anti-poggers.
I have been disempoggered.
I will update you tomorrow.
Have a picture of Windermere.
The lamb in wine and cream was jolly nice.
