I have not gone to work.
This is because I sat on the taxi rank until midnight last night and came home having earned the fabulous sum of six pounds.
I did not mind because I had a jolly good book, but it would have been nicer to have had a job to Lancaster.
It was the small hours of the morning by the time I had emptied the dogs and completed my own ablutions, and so I slept late again this morning. Hence I am going to finish writing to you as quickly as I can and go to bed. I do not want to waste tomorrow. I am trying to do lots of things with my solitary little life.
I do not know how I am managing to be so completely busy. It seems as though I ought to have absolutely loads of free time without anybody else here under my feet, but in fact I haven’t at all. I did not get round to breakfast until half past five this afternoon, by which time I was so completely ravenous that I wolfed it down as if I were Rosie with an unattended bowl of cat food
I did not even do any laundry, because on my own there is not really enough to fill the washing machine.
This morning I took the dogs off on our amble around the park, and came back to cut up firewood.
I ambled. The dogs bounced and gambolled and growled at somebody sitting harmlessly on a bench and stole another dog’s ball. Apart from that it was peaceful.
The worst of the weather seemed to have abated, thank goodness, and the morning was damp and cloudy, with little swirly gusts of wind. The mighty blasts that make it very scary to scurry around the Library Gardens at midnight, dashing hastily underneath the terribly creaking trees, have faded to become a stiff breeze. I will not mind going for a walk tonight.
I suppose at least I can think to myself that I am in absolutely no danger of being murdered. No murderer with half an ounce of self-preservation would hang about in the middle of that lot.
Once we came back I had Things To Do.
The builders had dumped the most massive pile of wood around our dustbins. I knew I did not have very much time, because of being due indoors for a Cambridge lecture at lunchtime, and so I had to hurry.
I filled the hearth and cleared a space on the stack of cut wood. Then I started bringing it in and cutting it up.
I had got about half of it in when the alarm went for class, and I had to dash in, brushing the worst of the sawdust off and dragging my fingers through my upstanding stiff-breeze hair. I don’t suppose you will be surprised to hear that I did not realise how truly awful I looked until the Zoom thing switched on. I had brushed off the worst of the sawdust, so presumably what was left was just the best bits, and I looked rather like the sort of scarecrow that has suffered several assaults from a family of crows, and is beginning to lose its stuffing in peculiar places.
I must be the only person who has ever attended a Cambridge lecture who very definitely has sawdust leaking out of their ears.
I tried to pretend that I knew what I was talking about, but as the class progressed, from my window I could see the builders reversing their truck up to our dustbins.
I was trying not to watch. I was trying to concentrate on dialogue and motivation, but it is difficult when somebody is hurling half a ton of wood at your dustbins.
My heart was sinking like mad all the way through the class, as the lecturer talked, and the pile got bigger. By the time we all said Thank You Very Much you could no longer see the dustbins at all.
Wearily, I put my boots back on and went back outside to shift it.
It took all afternoon but it is done. I have filled our entire wood store, the stack in the hearth, and there is a huge pile under the shed roof still waiting to be cut.
I have spent the evening picking splinters out of my fingers.
I hope they don’t bring me any more tomorrow.
