Goodness, I am having the flappiest of flaps.
I am flapping about so much that my hands hurt.
I am trying to get us ready to go to Cambridge. We will be doing this in a very few hours. The projected time was eight o’ clock this evening, but frankly we will be lucky if it is eleven at this rate.
I have been trying to organise suitable clothes. Obviously I have been doing this for days and days anyway, but now I am doing it again, in a really-meaning-business-this-time sort of way.
I do not know if I have organised the right clothes but I do know that I have remembered our underwear, since there isn’t any longer any of it in the drawer, so unless I have carelessly mislaid it then it is packed. I have collected my dress from the dry cleaner and sprayed the things that have been in the loft with anti-loft-smell stuff, which does not work. That is to say, it does work and our things no longer smell of the loft, but instead they smell really quite astonishingly peculiar. I have sniffed them several times, in passing, and marvelled at their undesirable weirdness, and eventually dumped them on a chair in the conservatory where one day, maybe even before we leave, I will get round to shoving them in a plastic bag ready to go to the dry cleaner.
The loft smells. I don’t know if I have mentioned it. It is not exactly damp, but it is a mouldy old house sort of smell, the sort of smell you associate with gloom and ancient cobwebs and funerals and sepulchres and not inheriting anything exciting. It is the sort of smell that makes you want to throw all the windows wide and empty the cupboards straight into the tip, except I can’t because they are our smart clothes, stored up there because there isn’t room in our bedroom.
It has been so bad that we have been contemplating a complete loft rebuild, so when we win the lottery that is absolutely the first thing to happen, none of this It Won’t Change My Life rubbish. I can jolly well tell you it will. We will be able to afford to eat at Cafe Italia instead of the Indian above the children’s wear shop, and at the moment we have got to save up for a few weeks before we can do that. My life will alter out of all recognition. Never again will I be eyeing the red-flashing fuel light on my taxi and hoping that I get a run towards the petrol station and not in the other direction. I shall throw parsimony to the winds and even buy fuel at Ings sometimes, which I never do at the moment because it is two pence more expensive than Troutbeck Bridge. There will be no end to my financial incontinence.
In the meantime I haven’t won the lottery, but one day I shall splash out on a ticket and then you will just see.
Since we haven’t won the lottery we are going away in the camper van tonight. I would have liked to stay in an hotel and also not be worried about the camper van collapsing halfway down the motorway, but life would be a poor affair if it did not involve the occasional adventure, and so I have been packing it. I thought we might be extravagant since we are not staying in an hotel, and so I have been to Booths and bought ethical cheese and smoked trout, caught, presumably, by an ideologically sound climate-friendly lone Eskimo with his fishing line poked through a hole in the ice. We have got lots of clear-conscience nice things to eat, and so I am sanguine about not hoteling.
Mark has been sweeping the chimney and servicing the boiler in the meantime, in between popping in to supervise my flaps. He has had the boiler in a thousand bits in the yard, and it is just going back together now. It always looks splendid when it is done, he has painted it and cleaned it and replaced some bent bits, and it is now black and shiny and gleaming in the kitchen fireplace.
This will be very nice to come home to.
In the meantime I am going to buzz off. I have not yet finished flapping.
I don’t know how much of this there will be over the next few days. I don’t know if I mentioned it but I am going to Cambridge where I am making a speech.
I might be busy.
