Well, another day has wagged rapidly past and I still haven’t been up to the loft.
I am becoming despondent about this, how my life is slipping through my fingers. I took the dogs up over the fells this morning, and it was absolutely jolly horrible. It rained and rained and rained so that every garment I had on became drenched, and when I got home I had to take it all off and drape it in front of the fire, where it steamed whilst I had my porridge.
It wasn’t quite dry when I came back to it. but I put it on anyway because I would have looked ridiculous going to the tyre place in the nude.
Also then the rain stopped, so I hung the washing out, so not all was lost, and it has not rained since so everything dried very nicely, which is just as well because it was towels, and it is a dreary moment to come to the end of my shower with only a damp towel for company.
Once the washing was dutifully hung, and the Weather Gods hopefully importuned, I unearthed the flat tyre from underneath the wheelchair ramps and set off.
The wheelchair ramps are the most awful stiff nuisance to manage, I hope I don’t get any wheelchairs. They are a nightmare of rusty grinding, swearing and trapped fingers. I shall try and remember to put some WD40 on them this week.
I once had a friend whose secret passion was to encounter a woman wearing nothing but a boiler suit and a squirt of WD40. Obviously I never obliged, not least because he was not that sort of friend, but it always inspired me to remember that the world is full of variety.
Actually the lady at the tyre place is a bit like that, only possibly not as obliging as would be necessary to feature in an erotic fantasy. She is always very cheerful and friendly, possibly because I am the only lady customer she ever has, the tyre place is always full of the sort of men who have a lot of tattoos and a threatening sort of countenance. She never ceases to awe me with her deft and competent handling of tyres, and seems to know a lot about them. She wanted to know how my tyre had managed to go flat, although I am sorry to say I wasn’t able to enlighten her. She pointed out all of its tyrely virtues and bemoaned the damage to its rim and exchanged it for another which cost me, rather to my horror, fifty quid.
Once I had rinsed myself of almost all of my cash I thought I would call in at Asda on my way home, because I had run out of the sort of stuff that I don’t purchase in Booths, like soap powder and dog food. I do not purchase these things in Booths because they are cheaper in Asda, and the dogs can get stuffed for ethical dog food, they will eat cow poo if I don’t watch them, so I am most certainly not paying £50 for a sack of something costly.
I do not think I will be going back to Asda again, however impecunious I am. They had sold out of almost everything I wanted, and the things that they did have were so expensive that considering their lack of ethical respectability, they were not worth purchasing.
I bought dog food anyway.
Also I wasted a cheerful twenty minutes chatting to a lady I knew whom I hadn’t seen for ages, so I had to rush when I got home.
Once home and unpacked, the half hour spare before work was too short to tantalise myself with a trip to the attic, so I thought I would give in to the postman’s complaints and cut a path through the vegetation in the front garden to the door.
We have not touched the front garden for ages, because of the bees, and there have been dozens of them this year, except you practically needed a machete to deliver a parcel. John the postman wears shorts, even in winter, so his trousers do not get wet in the rain, but all the same I thought I would hack it all back now that all of my favourite flowers are finished.
I do not know who invented strimmers, but it must have been somebody with time on their hands, because I wasted almost all of the time available dismantling the stupid thing and rewinding the wire. After that everything was green, including my trousers and the hall carpet. The hall carpet is green anyway but it is now green with sodden grass bits.
Still it is done and now anybody can come and see us, even if they do not know that the front door is only for Jehovah’s Witnesses, the local MP and John the postman. Everybody else comes to the back, where you can get in and out with perfectly maintained ease.
I am going to dash out of it now and go to work.
