I have spent much of today scrubbing burn marks off the kettle.
Mea culpa.
I have also been obliged to occupy some time handwashing my cardigan.
I do not think that I mentioned it, but I have bought a wonderfully soft silk-and-cashmere cardigan on eBay.
It arrived last week, and when I had some time at weekend, I washed it. You need to do this with clothes that have previously been worn by other people, because you never know what they might have been getting up to inside them.
Being made of silk and cashmere it said Dry Clean Only, but that would have cost another fifteen quid, so I washed it, hopefully, which seemed to be all right. When it was clean I filled it full of hair conditioner for its last rinse. This was in order that it would become as soft as the sort of towels that you see being squished into drawers in advertisements for fabric conditioner, but which would inevitably be too slippery to absorb any water when you rubbed yourself with them after your shower.
When I had done I smoothed it carefully and put it to dry on the office radiator. This was turned off and would not be too savage, and the lovely cardigan could dry gently in its own time without becoming shapeless.
One of the things that happened during my Zoom meeting last night was that the dogs had a prolonged fight under my feet all around the office.
Obviously I could not turn around and bellow at them, which was what they needed, and so I was reduced to kicking them under the desk, discreetly, so that I would not look as though I had got some sort of nervous twitch. The fight, along with savage-sounding snarls and growls, moved out of my way to the top of the stairs, and I turned the screen a little bit to make in the hope that the microphone would not notice, which it didn’t.
What I failed to notice, partly because there was already a pile of washing on the floor, was that they had somehow managed to drag my now dry, and soft and fluffy cardigan, off the radiator and on to the floor.
When they stopped tearing bits off one another they settled down in their usual place, in front of the radiator. They always sleep there when I am in the office, because sometimes the gods of canine good fortune smile on them, and the radiator is hot.
There they found my beautiful cardigan, and they liked its fluffy softness so much that they tugged it about a bit and made it into a lovely dog nest.
I was not pleased when I found out.
I do not like to think of myself as being the sort of person who can be gratuitously unkind to innocent defenceless animals, but the world is full of surprises, and actually it turns out that I can.
Hence today was spent scrubbing the kettle and re-handwashing my cardigan and smoothing it back into an upper-body sort of shape. If every university session creates so much labour afterwards I am not going to have time to write any essays.
I did not just spend the day doing tiresome domestic chores. The first task of the day was to take my taxi to pass its MOT, which of course it did, easily.
We have been worrying about this for ages and I can hardly describe the wash of liquid relief that followed, rather like the effects of the first glass of Cognac after a difficult day. It has been a terrible worry, not least because the MOT inspector failed the last one on something that was not even part of the test, and Mark got very cross with him.
We did not go to that MOT inspector this time. I expect he will be sorry when he finds out.
Today it passed, and I took all of the papers in to the council offices, and practically danced back down the High Street. Taxi licences are expensive, and I have been trying very hard not to spend the money for weeks now. It was very nice indeed to see it pass safely out of our bank into the council’s, and know that we will be in business for a little while longer yet.
After that I went to Asda, where I bought sausages and brandy. Shopping is less troublesome when the children are not home.
I did not need to get a taxi picnic ready, because we are not going to work tonight. Obviously I am at work now, because it is not tonight yet. It has become so very quiet on the taxi rank that we are going to have a night off.
There is nobody here at all. I think this is because of a combination of torrential rain and nobody having any petrol to put in their car to take themselves to the Lake District for a little holiday. Certainly I would not like to be here on my holidays at the moment. Everybody is very wet and wondering anxiously if they will be able to buy enough fuel to get home after they have checked out of their hotel in the morning.
Hence there will be neither taxi customers nor queues for restaurants, and so we are going to stop working early and go out and have dinner.
I am looking forward to this very much.
I will tell you all about it tomorrow.
