I am being plagued by texts from other Master’s’s degree students bemoaning how little they have written of the two pieces of work we are due to hand in in a few short weeks.
Some of them are hardly halfway through their second, and have no idea how they are going to finish in time.
Readers, I am nowhere near having written a single word so far.
I know exactly what I am going to do, but it needs some research and I have not done it. I went to Windermere Library and asked if they had any books on the subject, but they just looked a bit blank and said they hadn’t. I could order some, they said, but they didn’t know how long it would take.
I declined. I considered ordering some books on Amazon but it is the wrong time of year for spare cash, so I haven’t done that either. In any case there are so many books that I am longing to read I do not want to waste any reading cash that might become available on boring research.
I could borrow the books from the university library next time I am passing, I suppose.
I will consider it further.
Not only do I not have any book money, today I was obliged, rather resentfully, to blow some of our hard-earned funds on boring things like sausages and soap powder. We were both going to go into Kendal for the shopping trip, because that way Mark can park in the town centre and pretend to be a taxi whilst I am shopping, thus saving ourselves £1.50 in the car park and possibly even getting a real job whilst he is waiting. Anyway, it dawned on us over coffee this morning that really we had so many things that we urgently needed to do that it would be a Waste Of Resources for us both to do the same job. Hence he stayed at home and sawed up firewood whilst I went to Kendal.
Kendal was horrible. Do not waste your sympathy on Mark. Firewood does not jostle you or play jolly Christmas jingles over the loudspeaker system. Firewood does not require you to try and find a tall chap in the shop who can reach down the last packet of tea at the very back of the shelf. It does not need a parking space in an overcrowded carpark or demand that you beg passers-by to kindly change some coins in order to have a pound coin which can be jammed into the handle of the shopping trolley in order to release it from its chain-gang at the far side of the overcrowded car park. Firewood does not wait until you have shoved the very last coin into the stupid Unexpected Item In Bagging Area machine, before reminding you that you have forgotten milk.
Shopping was Not Nice.
I finished in the end, and hurled everything into the back of my taxi, which, incidentally, had got so filthy on our trip to Ripon that I couldn’t actually see out of the windows. I quite liked this after a while, it seems that other people just get out of your way if you ignore them thoroughly enough.
I was jangled when I arrived home. I put everything away and cooked the sausages, which burned because they are from Aldi and are about fifty percent sugar, and we had a brief tidy-up in the conservatory. This is quite pleasantly warm now that Mark has done his adjustments to the central heating system. He is planning to do some more but has promised he will wait either until I go away or die or something, because I have warned him that plumbing is not a hobby like model railways, where you keep adding another bit of track and moving the station. There is finite amusement to be had from plumbing.
Despite such grumpy considerations, I must acknowledge that he has done a rather splendid job. A bit like a model railway line, there is pipework all over the house now, twisting around cupboards and spiralling through gaps and diving down under the floorboards, but the whole house is warm, the water is hot, the conservatory is very nice to sit in even when the temperature outside is well below zero, and none of it is costing us anything at all. Even in the summer when the fire is out we will still have hot water.
This is a jolly good thing.
All we need to do is keep sawing up the firewood.
