I was on the taxi rank but I have come home, because there are no customers at all.
I am supposed to have come home in order to continue with my painting, but I had no sooner settled down at my desk than I recollected that I had neglected to write anything in these pages and so here I am.
In any case I do not have anything of any exciting note to write, unlike every other day, of course. Today has been a day of damply dreary cloud, too gloomy to put the washing in the garden, but not sufficiently wintery to make me feel that it would be a good idea to stoke the fire up and sit beside it, gazing fearfully out at the bitter chill in the back garden and occasionally chucking another dog on the fire.
That was a jest, for the animal lovers among you. The dogs cost us an absolute colossal eye-watering fortune in the vet’s yesterday, I most certainly will not be incinerating them for some time to come, at least not until their vaccines have worn off.
Instead I watered the conservatory and emptied the cat litter. The cats do not use the cat litter very much any more. They are being encouraged to empty themselves in the garden. I left a tray of ashes cooling there the other day and when I returned to empty it, it had been tidily filled with small dollops of cat poo. I do hope they waited until it had gone cold.
Mark often does not bother leaving the ashes to cool and he set the dustbin on fire the other day. He thought I would not notice him tiptoeing in and filling the watering can, but I did.
I ventured out into the November chill to the Post Office, where I assured the lady untruthfully that I was working on the Advent Calendars and would have them in the post any day now, and went back home with the honest intention of getting on with it, but was distracted into scrubbing the cuckoo clock.
You might remember that last year we bought two cuckoo clocks with the intention of manufacturing one functional one out of a combination of their working bits. In the event we did this, and had left over a single clock which it seemed a terrible shame to waste. I like cuckoo clocks very much, and think I would like every fifteen minutes to be marked not just by one, but two piping cuckoos, as well as the ponderous hourly dinging from the grandfather clock. Indeed, in unoccupied hours on the taxi rank, generally when I have exhausted eBay’s supply of desirable teapots, I quite often sit and gaze at beautiful wind-up clocks with absent longing, I am currently captivated by an ancient and peculiar German glass clock featuring a giant grasshopper and a ladybird on the inside, when I win the lottery it can sit on the shelf next to the teapot.
I keep telling myself that Mark might like it for Christmas and so perhaps I could buy it, but really I know he wouldn’t and it is just me.
Anyway, we are going to have a go at getting the second cuckoo clock to work. The first is currently working beautifully, it sits behind my desk and chirps at me. I have got to wind it up twice a day, but I do not at all mind this, it is part of the richness of life.
The non-working clock is in much worse condition but is more ornate. I think, when I have finished not getting round to painting Advent calendars, I am going to repaint it, but the first step to this was to scrub it, because it was horribly dirty.
I fastened an old head to my electric toothbrush and scrubbed it with some soapy water, being careful to avoid the already flaky mechanism at the back. This improved it enormously, and instead of getting on with the painting, which was what I was supposed to do, I rushed upstairs and tried to find a tiny plastic deer on eBay to replace the one which once adorned the clock, but which is now missing.
I couldn’t find any, so if anybody has any plastic farm animals left over from their children, I want one for Christmas please. A goat would do, it does not have the wild and delicate appeal of a deer but if I lived in a cuckoo clock I would prefer a goat. Well, I think I would. I have owned goats before and they are a nuisance, but there is not room on the cuckoo clock’s Alpine ledge for a cow, and so it will have to be a goat.
It was good enough for Heidi, after all.
De remember me if anybody else is clearing out junk from their loft.
