It is the most beautiful summer evening. The sunset is pink and blue and gold, and the swifts are wheeling and shrieking overhead.
It isn’t even raining.
It has been a lovely day, sunny and warm with a benevolent sheet-drying breeze. We even got a head start on the sheets, because we woke up early, well, nine o’clockish, and Mark took the dogs and rushed off to the farm to collect his trailer.
This meant I could not go on my walk, because obviously I do not have an excuse without the dogs. It becomes a simple pleasure-jaunt instead of an inexorable demand of duty, which would be wicked when there are so many things demanding my attention.
I stayed at home and did some of them.
I did not do very many but I made a start. I cleaned a couple of the windows, polished and hoovered and dusted. Then the man came to mend the television, which was a marvellous thing. Between us we heaved it cautiously off the wall and laid it on a special stand he had brought for the purpose. Then he unscrewed the back and removed an important-looking plate full of lots of intricate chippy bits and coils of copper and blobs of solder, and replaced it with a new one.
It took about ten minutes. He explained that this bit goes wrong quite a lot, so I observed carefully, because I do not want to fork out another fortune next time, and the chap said that the only important thing to know was the part number, because everything else could be done by an idiot. He showed me the part number and when he had gone I carefully cut it off the box and stuck it to the back of the television, where I will probably have forgotten all about it by next time and it will cost me another three hundred quid.
The television is a terrifying piece of equipment. It is mind-bogglingly costly and wafer-thin and fragile. It bends when you lift it if you are not careful and you have got to hold it by the stand that is screwed to the back. I have crossed Television Repair Man off my list of things I would like to do when I grow up.
After that I did lots of other cleaning things, like polishing and hoovering and lighting a pleasantly-scented lamp to make up for the still lingering aroma of another of Roger Poopy’s accidents, although fortunately it was so warm I had already thrown all of the doors and windows open.
I do not think he is very well.
He is very sorry for himself and has been lying miserably on the sofa for most of the day. I went to the vet for a worming tablet just in case he has got some hideous squirming parasite, but I don’t really think he has, because he is not eating very much and he is just feeling forlorn. Oliver gave them some leftover rice this morning, and Rosie ate some and then sprayed the rest liberally all over the floor by gathering a huge mouthful and then trying to take it to her cushion but accidentally sneezing on the way. I have swept up a very lot of rice since then.
Eventually I took them out over the fells. I felt guilty about this because it was cheating really, since Mark had already taken them out, and poor Roger Poopy trailed behind for most of the way, looking like an eight-year-old does when you take them shopping, only fortunately he can’t talk.
Mark had gone when I got back. His axle man has said that he will not be in his axle shop until Wednesday, so he will not get time to fix the camper van this week. He is going to go and get the axle and bring it back here, although I think that he has understood he is not going to be allowed to keep it in the garden. Then he will have to take it down the motorway and fix the camper van next time he comes home.
We do not know when anything will be happening at the moment. The job that he is supposed to be doing might or might not be happening. He is supposed to get on the helicopter on Friday but we will not know until Thursday if he really will.
In the meantime he has gone to Lucy’s to do some more kitchen-building things, so I will not see him very much on this trip either.
Ah well. I know what he looks like.
