It has been such an outdoor sort of day that I have hardly taken my boots off all day, and now I am at the far end of it, my fingers are large, and red, and fat from the cold, as if I were a Scottish sheep farmer.
We are, as I am sure you have noticed, having some wind. The outdoor sort of wind, obviously, not the indoor sort that would make you unpopular under the duvet. I do not have that sort but please feel assured that I would not tell you if I had. Some things are simply beyond the scope of these pages.
It would not matter if I did have since there is nobody else here at the moment. There are only the animals, and they are absolutely in no position to complain after their performances of last week, I can tell you.
In fact we have got the other sort of wind, the sort that takes your dustbins for a trundle up the back alley and blows the empty buckets around your back yard. When I came home last night our back alley looked like a slum street in the sort of third world country where they have not yet banned plastic bags. I was impressed when I took the dogs out this morning, because every last shred of it had been responsibly tidied up and put in dustbins, all of which were standing in tidy rows like fat plastic soldiers with bricks piled on their heads, what a virtuous lot we are in Windermere.
Hence I felt it incumbent upon me to do my bit and tidy up our own back yard, which was filled with a detritus of blown clutter, topped off with felled washing line poles. It was not raining, and it is Clean Sheets Day, and so I pegged them outside to dry whilst I did it. They flapped and billowed as if they were auditioning for the Kraken Cup, but they dried, which was splendid, and I shall sleep tonight in sheets which do not have even the smallest possibility of cat misadventure.
I don’t think they did anyway, but you can never be sure.
My Job Of The Day was to put my taxi through its MOT. Obviously Mark had done all of the actual work on it, taking it apart and bashing it back together with new springs and struts and other important bits. My role was to clean it. This is a loathsome job. It is a taxi and only ever used for carrying the drunk and drugged, and they are not fastidious, I can tell you, but of course if it is dirty it will fail its MOT.
I scrubbed it out, faithfully, like the virtuous Windermere citizen that I am. Also it has an ongoing MOT-failing problem called Water Ingress In Nearside Headlight, so I took the back off it and propped the hairdryer under the bonnet to dry it out. I was proud of this, feeling I could almost consider myself a mechanic.
When I had finally finished there was firewood to be sawn and lugged in to the house. Whilst Mark is away I have been trying to make sure that every day I cut more firewood than I use, so that he comes home to a neatly filled woodshed, and does not have to worry, but I don’t think he really noticed last weekend, because he was so worried about getting the taxi through its MOT.
Today it took ages, because the woodpile in the house had got so low. I refilled it with the newly-cut wood at the bottom and the driest at the top. I sawed and stacked and sawed and stacked until there was no more to be sawn, after which I had to go into the house and clear up the sawdusty mess I had made when I brought it all in.
I watered the conservatory and brought in the washing, visited the Post Office and swept the yard, after which it was time to take the car for its MOT.
Fortunately I noticed in time that I was absolutely covered in sawdust. I almost undid all of my hard work, merely by getting into the driver’s seat.
Almost, but not quite.
It passed.
This is a massive relief, because Mark is not here all week, and I do not think that drying out the headlight is a sufficient mechanical qualification to enable me to fix it if it had failed.
It doesn’t matter. We have an MOT.
PS. The title is Shakespeare. I haven’t actually been rude to anybody, although I am on the taxi rank and so there is still time.
