I have finally done it.
I have started on the Advent Calendars.
It is going to be a longetty long job. There are seven of them. That means that every hour put into a picture takes seven hours. A day’s work will bring the project forward by precisely one hour of painting.
I am pleased to have made a start, even if I am four months late. It is going to turn into a nightmare of rushing by the end.
Not to worry. Maybe I will suddenly be inspired and find myself able to paint at lightening speed. At the moment it is so long since I have done any real painting that I am slow and a bit clumsy.
I have been wearing an old painting T-shirt over my clothes but I am still covered in paint. I do not know how this happens. I am going to spend the next month with blue-and-scarlet fingernails and yellow blotches on my trousers.
I got drenched on my walk again yesterday. It was fine and sunny when I set off, and I had been contemplating hanging the washing outside on my return, when the once again the skies became black and the Weather Gods turned the taps on.
I was completely soaked. Right to my underwear. When I took my trousers off in the kitchen they landed on the floor with a wet slap and splashed drops of water everywhere.
I went upstairs and stood under the shower until I had thawed out.
I have decided that in the future I will look at the weather forecast every single day and I will jolly well hold the Weather Gods to account if they change their minds at the last minute. Once it is in writing then that has got to be final.
It did not rain today. Today it was still, and cloudy, and cold, but dry, and it did not matter that I had left my coat at home. I was busy having a quiet worry about my car. Once on, the reversing lights will not go off for ages, even when I am not reversing any more. I could see that this might be confusing for other drivers so I occupied much of last night desperately trying not to go anywhere backwards and hoping that everybody else was paying close attention.
I have not been sure what to do about it. Certainly it is beyond my capacity to repair. In the end I have purchased some of the red stick-on light lenses that you buy when you have accidentally backed into a fence post the day before your MOT is due. That should fix the problem. I will just have to manage to reverse in a rosy pink glow instead.
This is better than Mark’s proffered solution in which I unplugged the reversing lights completely and just guessed what was behind me when I was going backwards. That seemed to me to be to be considerably more perilous than it was worth.
Sometimes a single person’s life can be fraught with difficulty.
Fortunately I will only be single for another couple of weeks. Mark will be home then and I can tell him that it is his problem and not think about it again.
In other news, I have watered the conservatory and mopped the floors. One of the other taxi drivers told me last night, with great passion, about some opera singers he had been to see in singing in some packed Hungarian stadium to the accompaniment of a full orchestra. They were so wonderful, he added, the evening so moving, that he cried.
He has not been a taxi driver for very long so he still has access to some human emotion. That will change in the end.
In the meantime I was so intrigued by the story that I found the singers on Spotify and put them on, loudly, to encourage me whilst I mopped, and he was right, they were wonderful. They are called Il Volvo, they are a group of three tenors and they all seem to be about fifteen years old. I swirled around the kitchen to the deafening strains of O sole mio until the dogs went and hid in the conservatory. They were in disgrace anyway after one of them had an accident on the floor. I did not know which one it was so I told them that they were both unspeakably wicked and that nobody would ever love either of them, and they skulked off to hide under the table, miserably.
I watered the conservatory as well. We are going to have to do something about it. It has grown a very lot this summer. I can hardly get in through the door now.
It has grown some beautiful fungus.
Have a picture.
