I have indeed cast a clout, even if it is only my woolly shirt. I have not quite cast it, it is underneath the seat of the taxi waiting for the late night chill in the air, but when I walked up the fell this morning I was wonderfully lightweight in T-shirt and dungarees, I felt almost as though I had been on a diet.
I am enjoying the sunshine very much. All of the washing has dried, and Mark has switched off the central heating pumps. The fire is out, but the divorce solar panel is heating the water, so even without the fire, the water coming out of the taps is splendidly warm.
Of course housework dwindles hugely as soon as the warm weather comes. The fire is out, and so there is hardly any dust any more, certainly nothing that I need to become obsessive about, not that I was going to. There is no firewood to be hauled, or sawn, or stacked, and the washing dries outside in a matter of a couple of hours. I do not need to hang it all up again in the house before I go to work.
I do like the summer.
Regrettably my much-anticipated day of Having Mark Back turned into a damp squib, though. In my head we were going to go for a romantic walk up the fells, after which we would sit in the conservatory and drink lots of cups of tea whilst he listened sympathetically to all my tales of woe about being by myself, and then he would kindly offer to get dinner ready whilst I booked us into an expensive hotel for the Cambridge awards ceremony, in between which I could help him spend his wages on useful things on Amazon.
In the event he dumped an enormous stack of washing, filled everywhere with massive piles of oil-rig worker clutter, and went back to bed, where he stayed until one o’clock this afternoon. He said this was because he had been on night shifts and had not had any sleep since the day before yesterday, but my sympathy evaporated when he came down to the kitchen and asked if he could be helpful, looked around for a job that needed doing, saw one, reached the tea towel down and passed it to me.
I was not impressed. He has been on an oil rig, with instant laundry and an endless procession of cooked dinners, for too long. He sat peacefully in the chair for two hours, recovering from his hard labour and watching me making things for our taxi picnics and washing up.
I made some of the fish wraps that I like so much. Satisfactorily filling-but-non-fattening as they are, I will not be making them again. They are loads of faffing about and with Mark home they don’t last any time at all. I made enough for almost a week for me, but they will be gone by tomorrow night. I had forgotten how much he eats. It is a very, very lot.
In the end he sloped off out to unscrew a bit of my taxi and screw another bit on instead. I was not sorry. He did all kinds of things wrong even in the few minutes he had been helping, and it took me ages to get it all sorted out.
He even put my porridge bowl away in the cupboard. I never do that. I wash it and refill it so that the porridge is nicely soaked by tomorrow morning. I did not realise until this evening that he had done it, and was so horrified that I had to dash home from work to sort it out, how dreadful to come back from our walk in the morning and find that I had forgotten, and not only would I have no porridge, it would be Mark’s fault. That would be worse even than rascally Goldilocks.
The Three Bears would be a a fairy story beside my diary entry for that night, I can jolly well tell you.
