I am writing this in the car park outside the climbing wall in Kendal.
Oliver has gone climbing. You are supposed to read the title and imagine him, in the manner of Spider-Man, zipping up impossible vertical planes in a swiftly agile manner.
Spiders appear again later as well, but not much.
Lucy usually goes with him but she has gone home.
He is doing some sort of test which will enable him to climb things unsupervised in perpetuity. I do not know what this entails, but I am sure it will be lovely, how very clever my children are.
I did not bother to go in to watch, it seemed about as irresistible as an invitation to push him on the swings. I went to blow virtually the whole of my credit limit putting fuel in the taxi and to purchase tomatoes and salad in Sainsbury’s, which is handily next door to the climbing wall. I am now in the car park instead of being at home getting ready for work, and so I thought I would make the most of the time and write to you.
I have had a busy day. I made some soap this morning. This is as a present to me, because I have become weary and cross with the world, and in need of something nice. I did not have sufficient slush funds to purchase any, so I purchased some scented oils instead and made my own.
As with all of these things, by the time I had finished making it I was fed up of the smell anyway, like the people who make Quality Street. They are allowed to eat as many as they want, and hence become sick of chocolate after a while and never eat it again. I would not have believed this was possible except that it happened to us one Christmas when I was too busy to cook, and the Co-op had tins of Quality Street on offer. It took sixteen tins before we got sick of them, but we did in the end.
They were bigger tins in those days as well.
Anyway, this happened to me this morning. I had thought I would like soap flavoured with bergamot and black pepper and clary sage, and indeed it smelled lovely, until I had finished scraping it off the cooker and sluicing it off the dish and scrubbing it off the work surfaces. Now it just smells of kitchen, like showering in Vim-scented soap.
I will put it in the cupboard until I have forgotten.
I have also cleaned the windows. I have been looking at them for months and hoping that Mark would either clean them or call a window cleaner. I left the number for one pinned to the notice board, hopefully, but he has not taken the hint, and today the guilty feelings got the better of me, mostly because I couldn’t see out. I wish I hadn’t bothered, because now I can see what a mess the front garden has become. I did not do anything about that, maybe tomorrow.
I cleaned the bedroom whilst I was doing it, and my office, which somehow kept reminding me of the poem about the host of little spiders running a race across the ciders. I did not have any ciders, but it would have been nice.
Not only do we have lots of spiders it appears that we also have a mouse. We have been leaving the door open at nights for Rosie to go out and relieve herself, not that she does because it is too scary to go downstairs on her own, and we think that the mouse has come in from the garden. Roger Poopy found it behind the fire yesterday, and it was so frightened that it ran away across the floor and hid under the chest of drawers.
I have not found any mouse poo anywhere, so I think it must have just come in recently, also Roger Poopy likes mice very much, and it is the first time he has thought there might be one in the house, usually he hangs about the compost heap in the garden when he is in the mood for being a mighty hunter.
Mark has promised to bring home a trap. I hope the mouse has had the sense to buzz off back to the compost heap. Traps are horrid.
Oliver is returning.
I will see you tomorrow, unless I can’t be bothered, which is entirely possible in my current state of idle ennui.
Have a picture of my walk this morning.
