I don’t feel as though I have achieved very much, but I have run out of energy all the same.
I suspect I might not have had very much energy to start off with.
It has been a day off.
Neither of us have gone to work, and I am not even feeling very guilty. It has rained on and off all day, which is good for all of Mark’s little seedlings at the farm, and rubbish for encouraging tourists.
The new water pump for the conservatory turned up this morning, so of course Mark plumbed it in and tried it straight away. It worked brilliantly, except that one of the hoses appears to have come adrift somewhere, and when we looked we had a massive flood all over the floor, with several very upset worms frantically trying to learn to swim.
Mark mopped it up and we thought that perhaps we would need a rethink.
We could not rethink today, because of needing to repair the camper van. We have got to go and collect Oliver in a couple of weeks, and it is in a million pieces.
I painted the shelves, which you can see on the picture. This is only the first coat, the second looks even bluer, and the cupboard doors are pink.
I found the gold vinyl after a very great deal of hunting, and I am going to stick it on to the door of the fridge.
Mark chipped the dead wood out of the inside of the back wall. I helped a bit with that as well, but not very much because of making an accidental hole through to the outside world, and Mark had to try not to be cross about it. He has bashed the hole back and stuck some glue on it so that it will not matter, you can’t see it from anywhere and it won’t leak, so there was no need to make a massive fuss anyway.
The wood was not really wood any more in some places, but a sort of black sponge. It is dreadfully upsetting to see everything decayed into dreadful rotten splinters, but fortunately we have seen it lots of times before and know that it will be all right.
It is not nearly as upsetting as it was the first time we did it. That was dreadful. I remember the horrible bleak feeling of poking at the bathroom wall, and discovering that it had rotted away so badly that it could hardly stand up by itself. Inside the wall the wood had practically become a filthy liquid, and I thought that it was beyond repair, and that we would lose our lovely camper van.
To my huge relief, all turned out not to be lost. My brother helped Mark to fix it, and the van lived to chug another day.
That was almost ten years ago, so actually it has lived to chug a lot of days, and Mark has done a very lot more repairs.
I can hardly tell you what a miracle this is. The camper van is my very best thing, apart from perhaps the conservatory, and I think maybe it is even better than that. We have had it for fifteen years, and it was collapsing with ancient old age when we bought it. How lovely it would be to be able to take it back to show the previous owner, an elderly French chap whom we have always thought of as Monsieur Banana Fingers because of his DIY repair ability. How surprised he would be. He sold it cheaply, because he thought it was clapped out then, and probably he was right.
I love it very much. Mark looked at the lovely blue and pink shelves this afternoon and said that maybe it was because I did not have a Wendy house as a child, and he might be right.
I have got one now.
Mark has just come in. He has cut all of the wood to replace the rotted pieces in the walls, and we will be able to rebuild them tomorrow.
It is going to carry on chugging for a bit longer.
