In fact it is a bit like hibernation.
Apart from the usual dog-emptying excursions, and the evenings spent sitting peacefully on an almost undisturbed taxi rank, we are not going anywhere or doing anything much at all.
After the last few weeks, this is absolute bliss.
It will not be lasting very long, because Lucy is coming home very soon. She arrives next weekend, and is staying for a week to celebrate her birthday, and the week after I am off to Cambridge again, to find out how to write stories. I am writing a story at the moment, which is keeping me busy at taxi-moments when I am not knitting or writing to you, so it would be handy to find out how to do it properly.
In the meantime we have been getting up late and pottering round the semi-dark of our little underground-cave house like squirrels in the winter. Mark does not have to go back to work until Wednesday, and so today he has been Fixing Things again. He has fixed my all year round Christmas lights, which had stopped working, and also a leak which we had discovered under the sink, from one of the new heat exchangers that are keeping our house so wonderfully warm now.
This repair was a horrid job involving the removal of the cooker to get at the pipes.
This was ghastly. The cooker weighs about fourteen tons and sits in a little hollow in the floor so that a person whose legs are on the short side, ie me, can cook things on the top without standing on tiptoe.
It had to be bodily lifted out. This involved a lot of Incorrect Lifting, the sort that has a picture with a red line through it on the side of a new washing machine. There was also quite a bit of swearing and grumbling. I imagine they happen with new washing machines as well, although they are more difficult to explain in the illustrations on the sides.
When we lifted it out we discovered the most revolting filth behind it. I do not want to go into details, but every disgusting thing that has ever slipped down into the unreachable gap between cooker and work-surface was still there, having putrefied over the intervening couple of years, and become covered with a layer of grease, dust and spiders.
It was so vile that we decided we would not even use the hoover on it. Mark has an Outdoor Hoover that he keeps especially for shed-related ghastliness, and also hoovering out fallen soot from the bottom of the chimney, and we used that.
When he had finished tightening the loose pipe he filled the gaps with some lengths of board left over from when he first built the kitchen, and so it will never happen again. The unusable spaces beside the cooker will remain sanitary from this day forth.
This is a Very Good Thing, although probably we can’t do anything about the spiders. I do not know what they eat down there, bits of cheese and sausage fat by the looks of it, or maybe not, since most of those were still there.
It was a bit of a dreary sort of wet day outside, and worse, it was Clean Sheets Day, and so the house was, and indeed still is, draped about with wet washing all over the place. We will put the sheets back on the bed when we get home tonight.
I am enjoying it all very much. It feels very warm and safe to be having such a gently twilight life. I do not even mind being at work. It is so quiet that I have done lots of knitting. The knitting needles are getting a bit bent, because I keep accidentally shutting them in the taxi door, but they are still working, and I will have a new cardigan probably even before next winter at this rate.
Mark has been watching and thinks he likes the idea of making clothes. He is occupying the quiet hours on the taxi rank watching explanatory videos about dressmaking on YouTube.
I shall put in an order for a new dress.
He can do it when he has finished putting the windmill up.
