Pathified.

We have had another splendidly full day.

There is nothing as wonderful as being at home together on days when the sun shines, apart from possibly being on holiday together in a ludicrously expensive hotel, with the sort of waiter who has a red jacket and a white cloth over his arm, and stands patiently at the side of the swimming pool, occasionally producing dishes of olives..

I might have mentioned this before, but my absolutely favourite sentence in the English language is: Would Madam like red wine with that?

Misfortunately this was not a sentence that I have heard today, although I suppose there is still time. Today we have busied ourselves with the improvements to the conservatory.

I am sure that I have mentioned that we have decided that our conservatory is in need of an air of opulence. Well, I have decided it. Mark has decided it in the sense that he has not argued about it, at least not very much.

Yesterday Mark started building the new flower bed, which is going to hold tomatoes and lemons and probably basil, if I can get it not to keep dying. I have planted the seeds already, except for the lemons, which we will be moving from the other bed as soon as we have finished the building work and it has been filled with soil.

We have got to be careful with the soil, which comes from the farm. There is nothing opulent about stinging nettles.

You can see the flower bed in the picture. It has been lovingly and opulently shaped in order to create a beautiful pathway and air of mystery. It is not finished yet, and we will have to go back to the farm to inflict more bricks on Mark’s taxi suspension.

I expect you can see the opulence starting to shimmer from the very fabric of it.

The idea is that instead of just going directly from the door of the conservatory to the door of the house, one takes a slightly circuitous path around the sofa. This both gives the feel of being a beautiful garden pathway, and also gives us room to fit in the dining table and the sofa with enough room for the chairs, which was the most important reason really.

You need not be cynical. It is going to be splendid, and Mark thinks it is less trouble than building a fairy tale castle on the other wall, which I had wondered about. There might even be room for that as well but I don’t want it now that we have got an opulent pathway.

We are going to build arches and pillars over it. Watch this space.

Whilst Mark  was building an opulent pathway, I went into the yard and cut firewood. We had got a massive stack of this, it has been cluttering up the yard for ages, and it all needed to be cut to log-burner lengths and stacked neatly under its little roof.

Mark showed me how to use his chop saw for this. I have never used this before, and I do not think that I liked it very much.

The circular saw has savage terrifying teeth and goes round and round at massively high speeds. There is no safety guard and it wobbles about on top of the dustbin. It will not stop unless you unplug it. It is a tool which must be approached with great caution and trepidation, and preferably not approached at all. The best way of using it is to stand a long way away and shove everything through it with a stick.

You cannot see the teeth of this saw at all, because they are hidden behind a finger-protecting plastic shield. It is anchored solidly and as soon as you take your finger off the trigger, it stops. It does not slow down over a period of a moment or two, so that you stop it by touching a bit of wood along the side of it. It has a brake, and stops dead.

In short, it is designed to be used by any reckless idiot, and after a minute or two you are so unworried about its secretly wicked bite, that you are slapping the wood around it with abandon.

It lulls you into a false sense of security. You forget that you are doing a lethally dangerous task. There are bloodstains all over it now.

Health and Safety is not always a good thing.

It might take a few days for my sore fingers to get better.

Actually I did not really cut them on the saw. I trapped them in the wood pile when a huge old joist slipped and crushed them, but the principle is the same. If I had been tiptoeing about the yard in my usual firewood state of abject fear, I might have been a bit more careful.

They are very sore indeed and covered in blood blisters. I had to put ice on them and everything. They are my typing fingers, well, one of them is, and so I hope that you appreciate the suffering that I have endured to bring these words to you.

Mark says that you shouldn’t burst blood blisters, but I am going to.

There are bloodstains on the keyboard as well now.