I am in bed at Lucy’s house. She has turned the heating off to save money. She is not an old age pensioner but is perhaps doing it in a spirit of solidarity.
It is a cold night, but by a magnificent chance of good fortune there are some heavy, thermally-lined curtains here, and I have pulled them over the duvet to keep me warm. This is working brilliantly.
I am very grateful to past-me for those efforts. I never imagined I would feel so pleased about something that I never thought to notice again.
We have had the busiest of days. A man came practically in the middle of the night, long before nine o’clock, even, to deliver a new bed, and we all had to get up to let him in. We dumped the bed in the spare room, which was where I had been sleeping, so even if I wanted to there was no possibility of sloping off back under the duvet again.
Instead we got on with the day’s efforts, which mostly was trying to fix the washing machine.
It needed a new door seal. Then it needed new shock absorbers.
I do not know if you have ever tried to fit a door seal to a washing machine. If you have, you will know that a far better idea would be to throw it away and get a new washing machine. You would be better off moving house and leaving it behind you. You would be better off emigrating. There are few tasks more painfully tiresome.
It took hours and hours, leaving us with battered fingers, cracked fingernails and bashed knuckles. In the end when the seal was finally fixed the door lock would not work. We thought perhaps we had knocked the sensor, but could not find any obvious flaw, and a washing machine man said on the telephone that this was because that kind of washing machine was rubbish and tried to sell Lucy a new one for six hundred quid. In the end Lucy’s boyfriend, who does not have a great deal of patience or six hundred quid, rang Curry’s and ordered one, which was a cheaper alternative. He is going to collect it in the morning.
Once that problem was solved we turned our attention to clearing up, which quickly turned into demolishing the remains of the old kitchen. They have a new kitchen which is at the other end of the room, and the old one has got to go in order to give them some space for eating. They decided to demolish it today so that it could go to the tip with the old washing machine in the morning.
The demolition was an adventure because of re-routing all the water and bashing the waste pipes out. Lucy and Jack knocked all of the old tiles off the walls and hauled out the old cupboards, and in the end it was gone, leaving a lot of ancient dust to be swept up and an empty space where once there had been a kitchen.
It was dark by then, and we suddenly realised that my room was full of cardboard boxes containing an unconstructed bed, and we all dashed upstairs.
The bed took hours and hours. It was the sort where the mattress lifts up to reveal a hole underneath which you can stuff full of unwanted junk instead of taking it to the tip.
I will draw a veil over astoundingly complicated instructions and finger-trapping bits. It was not nice.
We were exhausted by the time it was eventually done, and starving.
We ordered a takeaway which we shared with the dogs before collapsing into bed.
There were some nice bits to the day. Jack’s dad turned up with Poppy the Poopy, much to Rosie’s utter delight, and all three dogs romped about noisily, getting under everybody’s feet until we booted them outside to get run over, which they didn’t.
After that my mum turned up, with a box full of cake and biscuits, and very kindly donned some rubber gloves and scrubbed the bathroom.
I can hardly say how grateful I was for that when I got in the shower tonight, and it was clean and fresh and smelled nice. Indeed, it might have been the finest moment of the day. Lucy is not one of nature’s little housewives at the best of times, but both she and Jack have been out at work for twelve hours a day all over Christmas, and to say it has been neglected was an understatement. Lucy was very late last night because somebody inconsiderate got stabbed, and in consequence, the bathroom was revolting.
It was not revolting as a consequence of last night’s stabbing, obviously, but as a consequence of several kidnappings, rapes and assorted assaults. These things do not happen overnight.
The kitchen was not much better.
We are beginning to see that there may be an end to it all eventually. Things are beginning to look optimistic.
I am going to pull up my curtain and get some sleep.
It has been a very long day.
