It is turning into a quietly uneventful day.
I have deliberately made sure that it is uneventful, because now that I am a working woman again I can jolly well do without loads of eventful things cluttering up my life.
I do not have the time.
I am a responsible household provider.
I have not provided very much, about forty five pounds so far this week, but that is not the point. The point is that I am now an importantly equal member of the governing body of our house, and do not have time to waste on trivia.
I like this.
I am too busy to do all sorts of things.
I should have cleaned the windows today. The ones with the ivy growing around them have got an attack of blackfly, and the blackflies have pooed all over the double glazing.
Really I should have massacred the blackfly and cleaned the revolting left-behind greasy residue off the glass, but I did not. I left them, munching stickily on ivy leaves, and thought that I would do something about it another time.
I am far too busy for such trivia.
Mark went off to work this morning. He did not at all want to go to work, he wanted to stay at home and tootle about with some of the projects in his shed. He is still thinking hard about the best way to build a nuclear reactor. The thing is that he has got to go and install rural broadband all week next week, but the house in Barrow needs to be finished off urgently.
Poor Number One Son-In-Law is stuck on his oil rig and so can’t do anything at all to help, and of course the house has got to be finished so that it can stop costing them money and start making some. Mark thinks that there are about five days work left, but that is a very long time if you can only squeeze in one day a week.
When he had gone I did all of the usual uneventful things, like washing up the pots and emptying the dogs and hanging out the washing. Then I belted upstairs to write a bit more of my story before going to work.
I can’t write my story at work because my flat computer thing is slowly becoming so elderly that it should be offered a bat-flu injection. It doesn’t quite load big documents properly, and at one or two very unlucky moments I have written a page or two and the screen has become blank, and then everything I have written has disappeared, lost for ever into the ether. When we have made our fortunes again Mark thinks we might buy another one. I would like that. I expect I could write much better stories on a shiny new computer.
Hence I am writing my story at home, in snatched moments when I ought to be doing other things. It is the sort of story that people call dystopian, by which they mean it is set in a place where you would not like to live. I do not like writing upsetting things, however, so the idea is that people escape from the dystopian-ness and live happily ever after. I do not think this is really a spoiler because I have not written it yet.
I have just finished the first chapter. It is five thousand words long and concludes with a cliff hanger. I am pleased with myself for getting an exciting moment into my story so quickly, when I read stories I tend to like the dull bits best, and like plenty of those before anything troubling happens. Indeed, if I pick up a book in Waterstones with a crisis on the first page I will probably decide that it is drivel and put it down again, but I know that you are not supposed to write books like that these days.
I will give it to Mark to read tonight and if he feels sufficiently hung on a cliff then I will write some more.
Obviously he will because he is always polite about my stories and generally surprised to find out what a lot of internal whittering is going on inside my head.
Have a picture of some baby tomato plants.
