Clearance

Well, everybody, unexpectedly I am in the camper van.

I am in bed, in an in-my-dressing gown sitting on the quilt sort of way, and I am pink and glowing and exhausted.

We are at the farm.

Mark was not working, so we decided last night that we would come here and have a serious tidy up.

It is Mark’s field, and so obviously it is full of every sort of chap-clutter imaginable. He has several incomprehensible machines, full of pipes and tanks and gadgets, waiting in his little field-shed for him to make them work, whatever that might involve, and tools and tubes and countless bits and pieces that he thought might come in useful one day, which so far, haven’t.

It needed clearing up.

We have been here all day and we are going to stay and do some more tomorrow.

We have had a huge bonfire. This is still burning now, brilliant orange in the impenetrable werewolf darkness outside the camper van. It has been going all day, and I have ruthlessly burned every bit of might-be-useful board that was so blackly rotten it fell to bits as I picked it up.

We even did a run to the tip. There were ancient tarpaulins and mouse-eaten plastic sheets, old bottles and tubs and bits of hay-bale string. There were bits of old tools, and more buckets than any man can possibly need in a lifetime, and odd bits of metal and glass.

We will have to go again tomorrow.

It has actually been a brilliant day. I am going to stop writing soon, because my eyes keep closing in spite of all of my efforts to keep them open, which I am prepared to admit might be because of the wine.

It forecast rain, but in the end it hardly rained at all, so maybe the Government made it up again. It has been blustery and cloudy, but not cold. We re-covered the roofs of the wood stores with old carpet and plastic sheet, which billowed and bellowed like a brave topsail on the high seas whilst we frantically chucked bricks on the top of it before it set sail across the field.

It has been brilliant to be out of doors. I heard the first cuckoo of the year, the first time I have heard it before the swifts come back. They should be back by now, they are so late. I have been looking for them every morning, but I thing perhaps it is still just too cold. They must be here soon, with their hope for the sunshine and their summertime calls.

Maybe tomorrow.

There are no swifts, but there was an owl this evening, and Roger Poopy has found a mouse nest. He likes it very much, and has been scraping at it and barking excitedly practically all of the day. So far no mouse has appeared, so either it is ignoring him or it moved weeks ago.

We sawed firewood and stacked it, piled the bricks in tidy towers.We covered the stinging nettles with sheets of black plastic and weighed them down with old tyres.  We moved things and dragged things and filled the log piles.

Something has bitten me, probably an irate spider, because it left two tooth marks and an enormous bruise. I have so many nettle stings that my fingers are tingling even now, and my hands are sandpaper-dry.

We pegged the washing to dry beside the van, and brought vegetables to cook in the tajine, but in the end we didn’t cook anything. We kept remembering that we were hungry and had forgotten breakfast, but then something else needed doing, so we worked a bit more, and then in the end it had gone dark, and we thought that what we would like most was wine.

We drank wine and looked at the fire, whilst the dogs wagged about and jumped, and tried to persuade us to concentrate on dog-ownership.

We saw a rainbow as the sun was setting, and thought that perhaps we are the most fortunate people in the world.

I am exhausted and fortunate, and going to sleep it off.