Goodness, we have had an adventurous day.
It was Lucy’s birthday. I have had Lucy for twenty two years, and she arrived last night with a suitcase full of clothes and two tiny, deceptively fragile-looking kittens.
They are not fragile. They are the Silent Menace.
We were woken up this morning by one of them sitting on the headboard to our bed, pushing the things which live on the top of it – glasses, tissues, and so on – off on to our heads. It was examining the consequences with a detached fascination.
There are absolutely everywhere. Wherever I turn there is a kitten there. I reached up to the coat hooks this morning to disentangle my apron, and there was a kitten on the top of them. I came to lift a book down from the bookcase on the top of the stairs and there was a kitten in amongst them. I dipped my paintbrush in the painting water this afternoon and there was already a kitten there, sitting on my desk, dipping its paw in the water and shaking it off all over the blotter.
They have already caused a small domestic tragedy.
Of course you know that Rosie is helplessly in love with Roger Poopy. Roger Poopy is her moon and stars, her sunrise and sunset. She is his faithful shadow, following him about and curling up beside him at nights, and he has tolerated her, loftily, accepting such adoration as his due.
Roger Poopy has now fallen utterly in love with one of the kittens. Not both of them, he doesn’t seem to give a hoot about the other, but one of them has aroused such passion in his soul that he has spent the entire day trailing around after it, gazing at it with longing. When it sits still for long enough he prods it lovingly with his enormous nose, and washes it patiently and carefully, with his large dog-tongue. This kitten now smells rather repellently of dog-dribble.
Rosie is very sad. She has been rejected for a beautiful, delicate rival, with dainty paws and a tiny snub nose, who is not called Fugly by the entire household. The kitten is not short and bouncy and enthusiastic. It does not charge around the park, rolling in the mud and barking at the top of its voice. The kitten does not salivate with excitement every time somebody gets cheese out of the fridge. The kitten is disdainful, and does not snore loudly nor lick its paws after it has poked them in its ears. The kitten has won Roger’s heart.
It is a sad day to be a clumsy puppy.
Fortunately for Rosie the kitten will be gone soon. She will just have to be patient.
In other news, I have spent much of the day making various preserves out of the apples and blackberries. I have added a couple of the onions Mark grew at the farm and made some of them into chutney, which has turned out splendidly, we sampled it with cheese this afternoon. I boiled the rest hard and poured it into muslin, which is now dripping, splendidly, into a bowl, so we will have both jam and jelly in a day or two, if only we had enough jam jars. We have got about four left, I am going to have to try and find some more from somewhere.
Mark has spent the day cutting firewood, because the man at the builders’ yard has just come back from his holidays and found his yard full of clutter left behind by builders, so he kindly chucked it all over the wall and we are going to burn it to keep our house warm.
We have also acquired a temporary lodger for a few days, who was accidentally rendered homeless in between the rather uncomfortably abrupt conclusion of one employment, and the commencement of another. This is a bit of an occupational hazard here in Windermere, where so many staff are live-in. Being rude to the chef can mean that you are selling the Big Issue a couple of hours later.
He seems to be a relatively harmless sort of lodger so far.
Maybe he will turn out to be good at cutting firewood.
