Satisfaction.

I am very pleased indeed to be able to tell you that my taxi has a brand new MOT.

It is legally acceptable to be driven, and better still, I have filled in all of the tiresome council paperwork and returned it and even paid the bill. This last made us grimace a bit, in the way that parting with cash always does, but it is so nice to have it done and sorted out that I don’t really mind. Even better than that, with an organisational aplomb that has rather surprised me, it is still a week before the deadline, and so I have not had to suffer the terrible agonising last minute anxiety about Whether It Might Fail And We Will Be Unemployed And Starve To Death Piteously In The Streets.

It is done, and we won’t, so you can all stop worrying.

Mark spent the day faffing about with the taxi, which meant things like driving it to Lancaster for some new tyres, and I faffed about on my own account.

I met the postman on my way back from the dog walk this morning, and he had a parcel for us, which turned out to be a bit that was missing from Mark’s plumbing-reconstruction activities. When Mark came home he screwed it into place, so that the shower worked again. The newsworthy bit of this was that my desk, which covers the service hole in the wall behind the bath, could be shoved back into place after weeks and weeks of being disconcertingly misplaced.

Obviously we have still been having showers. I do not think I would at all like to go to bed being still grubby. It is very nice indeed to be a clean person in between clean sheets. This was possible because in fact we have got two showers in our bathroom. This is not because we are middle-class, although I like to pretend that it is when we have visitors, but because we have got a shower that runs off the hot water from the stove. This came as part of the bath, which regular readers will recall that we found in a shed once. There is also an electric one for the seasonal moments when there is no hot water in the stove, like now, because the stove is still in the yard. I stubbed my toe on it when I was pegging the sheets out this morning.

It was the stove-shower that was missing. This was partly because the whole of that heating system has been bashed out and is not functioning, but also because you might recall that when we last went away to Manchester, it leaked through the downstairs ceiling and took ages to dry out. For some days we had indoor rain as well as outdoor rain. This did not matter very much, it is quite surprising what you can get used to when your whole soul is thinking about poetry.

I am sorry to say that I am not thinking about poetry in the contemplative manner of a psalmist quietly meditating on the universe and wishing to share the joys discovered therein. I am thinking about poetry in the slightly sweatily anxious manner of somebody who has jolly well got to write one, and quickly, because it has all got to be handed in in a week, and so far I have written about four lines and they don’t rhyme.

Maybe tomorrow after I have finished baking some biscuits.

Today I did not write poetry. Today I shoved my office back together in the right places and brought all the clutter which generally dwells therein, back down from Oliver’s room where it has been shoved for the last few weeks. Mark has had the office carpet up, and the floorboards up, and he has been putting new pipes underneath, but he has finished now, and I can put all of my things away again.

It was all terribly dusty. I washed everything, and hoovered, until slowly it began to feel lovely again.

I passed a very absorbing sort of day organising my office back into place again. This is a lovely thing to do, and involves neat rolls of wrapping paper and refilled staplers and receipts tidily recorded and filed and paper clips in their little box. I have not finished even now, and can look forward to another day tomorrow, when I can make thoughtful decisions about the best storage facility for craft knives and rulers.

My office is becoming its usual tidy self at last. I am very pleased about this. I sat in the chair and looked out of the window before I came to work, and thought how splendid it was to be in a tidy little space looking out on the setting sun.

Better still, my taxi was wonderfully clean and tidy as well, because it had just had its MOT.

What a most satisfactory state of affairs.