It is Monday, so I have been cleaning.
Weekends are busy times at work, and so the house occupies itself in our absence by sprouting little piles of debris in the corners whilst nobody is looking.
Today I scraped them all out again and washed away the little tufts of cobweb that had begun to flutter around them.
One poor mummy-spider had thoughtfully laid a lot of tiny baby-spider eggs and wrapped them lovingly in soft cobweb. She was sitting, protectively, a little way away from them, dreaming of having lots of little spiders to cherish.
Regrettably the nest was just over the top of our bed. Not only was it over our bed, it was directly above my pillow. There must have come an evening when dozens of little baby spiders would have marched out of their cobwebby cradle, looking for warm places to spin their own lethal fly-traps.
I am not very fond of spiders, especially the black, assertive ones.
There was not room for me and a spidery family in the same bedroom, it is simply not big enough. One of us had got to lose, and I was the one in possession of the hoover.
This was savage and unkind but I am not nearly as benevolent an individual as I like to imagine that I am. Indeed, it could be said that when it comes to certain sorts of ruthlessness, I am entirely psychotic.
Readers, I hoovered away all the little eggs.
I did not hoover away the mummy spider, which perhaps my gentler readers might be relieved to hear. She dashed away in a terrible traumatised panic, and squeezed off through a chink in the top of the open window, so perhaps she has gone to live in the garden. Of course I hope she finds a new life and happiness with another daddy spider, and they can have as many babies as they like among the yellow loosestrife that I really ought to have dug up and never did, maybe next year.
Once that small unpleasantness was over, at least for me, although I imagine the poor spider will be managing the disaster for a few days to come, I turned my attention to my office.
Beside my desk there lives a Yucca plant, a thoughtful present from Number One Son-In-Law, which began life as a portably small houseplant, and which has now become a middle-sized tree.
It had become so leafy and prolific that it was preventing me from reaching the telephone, and something needed to be done.
I summoned Mark, who inspected it for a moment before suggesting a chainsaw, but we compromised on building a shelf to lift the pot up a bit so that the leafy bit was above the desk, and repotting it.
You might remember that I have been very organised lately, and had scrubbed out all of the plant pots, with the consequence that there was a beautiful blue one of just the right size, clean and entirely suited to the purpose.
We lugged the Yucca down into the yard and out of its bucket. Then we shovelled some of the beautiful wormy garden compost into its pot and levered the Yucca into it, squishing it down around the edges until the Yucca stood tall and splendid above it.
It looked very pleased with its good fortune.
Mark staggered back up the stairs with it, although really it should have been harnessed behind a couple of horses and dragged, because it has become more than big enough to house a couple of dryads and still have room for them to take in a lodger.
We mounted it on its new desk-height shelf, and its leaves rustled majestically against the ceiling.
After that I tidied my desk up. It had become very cluttered underneath the abundant foliage, and I cleared up books and paintbrushes and tubes of paint and different inks and the other general detritus that seem to accumulate during moments of inspiration.
I can now not only see my computer, I can write on it and answer the telephone and paint pictures, any time I like.
I did not want to come to work. I wanted to stay in my newly ordered office, writing and gassing and painting pictures, but obviously I couldn’t.
It has been a most successful tidy-up.
