Barking

I am feeling very happy with my world.

You can see in the picture what I have been doing.

I have turned our re-purposed trampoline-arch into an archway-shaped tree.

This has taken me practically all day, and I have not finished.

It did not quite take all day. I made some yoghurt and hung up some washing. That was where my virtue ended. I forgot completely about the second lot of washing, and dinner was produced in a hasty panicked dash when I realised at a quarter past seven that I had not even remembered to buy the things I needed, never mind cook them.

Instead of fulfilling my maternal responsibilities, I faffed about joyfully, being creative and making a colossal mess.

The first thing that had to be done was to install a watering system. This involved connecting lots of bits of pipe together and bashing some leaky pegs on to the ends of it. This went together an awful lot more easily when it occurred to me that the pipe would be more malleable if I warmed the ends up in a candle flame first. This worked brilliantly. although I had one or two accidental meltings, and some burned fingers.

Mark has promised to attach the watering system to the roof-water tank, which is going to involve a lot of drilling holes and attaching taps, because at the moment we do not have a tap on the end of the pipe from the tank. We stop the water going all over the yard by the simple method of hooking the end of the pipe over the washing line. Fortunately the Peppers have got some unwanted taps, and so we will help them to declutter by pinching them out of their shed. This is called being Marie Kondo. I do not know why, but I read about it in the august Daily Telegraph, so it must be true.

Perhaps Marie Kondo was a famous tap thief.

Once I had stuck pipes all along the length of the arch I tied bits of bark around it with string. I have had the bark soaking in a bucket so that it would be good and wet for the moss to stick to. It was good and wet, and water ran down my arms and soaked my shirt sleeves, but it was suffering for my creative art, so I hardly noticed, even when it got to my armpits and dribbled down my vest. It is still middle class to be sodden and scruffy if you are an artist, so it was all right.

After the bark I cut up the chicken wire and hooped it around what I should now describe as the trunk.

I stuffed it with soil and moss.

This was very messy. It is now very much later, and I am ready for bed. The undressing and showering process released surprisingly large quantities of moss and bark from my hair and underclothes, which will need hoovering up tomorrow. There were probably some insects in there as well, but I am trying not to think about those.

Also I was scratched and scraped to bits. The undressing and showering for bed is usually followed by a squirt of perfume for bed, because I share the same tastes in nightdresses as Marilyn Monroe. This made me squeak and jump this evening, I can tell you. My hands look as though I have been trying to give a furious alley cat a bubble bath.

I had got halfway to the top of the arch before I remembered that I had intended to include fairy lights in this mixture, so I had to take it all down and start again, with fairy lights, which I pinched from the box of Christmas decorations. I will have to remember to do something about that before next Christmas, it would be terribly disappointing to open the box and then discover that the Christmas tree will have to stay dark until Amazon can deliver some more.

Oliver came down and helped a bit, in between answering a survey that school had sent to him, wanting to know what they could do better, so Oliver was telling them. He wrote pages and pages. I dared him a bag of doughnuts to say that he liked to dress up as a girl and that he felt the boys boarding house did not offer sufficient opportunities for this, but he was withering. He said that a dare like that was worth fifty quid of anybody’s money and that he would be game if I would shell out, but I did not have fifty quid, and so his replies are predictably sensible. Then he asked if I was planning to feed them bark for dinner, laughed, and departed.

The Peppers came round to take the dogs out and pointed out that the watering system would very probably involve needing an umbrella to walk underneath it.

Umbrellas are not expensive so I do not care.

I did not finish because I ran out of time, daylight and moss, so tomorrow I will have to go back to the farm for some more. You can see where I got to in the picture.

You can also see that the yard is full of clutter again. This is because next door was taking down their conservatory. Imagine how surprised I was when they started bringing it all round and dumping it in our yard.

Of course Mark had asked them for it.

I imagine he thought it would come in handy for something.

Once we have made the conservatory magical and opulent, I have warned him that we are going to start on the yard.

He had jolly well better remember it.