It is the middle of the night, and once again, I am only just getting around to starting to write to you.
Mark is at work. He will be back shortly, and then I will take a short break in the manner of wives whose husbands have been loafing about at work all night, and say How Was It For You Dear, or something. Probably I will have to finish this in my dressing gown.
It has been a long, longetty long day, mostly because I woke up at half past five from a peculiarly confused dream about trying to open a gift shop in a crematorium, and then couldn’t go back to sleep.
It didn’t seem like a bad idea, actually, if I had a crematorium I would probably have a decent sideline flogging off scented candles and books about How To Manage Your Grief, Start Off By Giving Me A Tenner. If Ripon Cathedral can get away with shelves full of all sorts of tat then I don’t see why a crematorium couldn’t, although probably they would have to draw the line at themed Christmas tree baubles.
Anyway, I haven’t got a crematorium, and since by my current standards of performance I am unlikely ever to have much to do with one until I am being carried in myself, it wasn’t especially relevant. Hence I expanded my sleepless worrying into all sorts of rubbish about packing and travelling and who had tickets for which bit of the graduation event until finally I fidgeted so much that I woke Mark up and he got up with a sigh and made us some coffee.
Once we had had coffee then I had to stop worrying and start actually doing things, which turned into an enormous mess in almost no time. I took the dogs off over the fell, but spent almost all of the walk wittering on the phone to people, just like really irritating people do on walks, and as a result the whole thing was a completely pointless exercise because I didn’t notice any of it at all.
Once home I had to start sorting out the mess. I dragged an enormous suitcase down from the attic and started faffing about trying to fill it with everything that I had emptied out of our drawers and cupboards. Fortunately some previous version of me seemed to have been very organised, and everything had been dry cleaned and neatly hung on hangers in labelled plastic bags, which made life a bit easier.
I had a small but satisfactory interlude after that. I discovered a moth in the attic yesterday, which sent me squeaking down the stairs in horror, because of course all of our very best clothes are hanging in there. They have all got cedar balls in their bags, but suddenly this no longer seemed savage enough, being a woolly-minded green hippie planet-saving useless sort of thing to do, and so I hastily clicked on Amazon and filled my virtual trolley with Killer Death Extinction Poison Danger Moth Massacre sachets and sprays instead.
It all arrived today and I hastily carted it all up into the attic and put sachets in all the clothes and sprayed the carpet and furniture.
I found another moth whilst I was squirting things, and squished it ruthlessly so it wouldn’t get any chances to lay any more eggs before I poisoned it.
It was supposed to smell of lavender but actually it smells like something Saddam Hussein might have dropped on the Kurds.
I should think it will do the trick.
Mark was faffing about with his chainsaw in the yard, which he thought was urgent and I was ignoring, but eventually he remembered that we had run out of sausages, and so we dashed out to Booths. When we got back I made him think about which shirts he most wanted to wear on holiday, and he stared at them as if he couldn’t quite remember on which end of a person they were supposed to go. In the end I just packed the ones I liked, which is what I usually do, and he went off to sit on the taxi rank where he could just wear his old comfortable shirt and the ancient tweed jacket with the holes in the elbows.
My last job of the day was to make a set of curtains, which was what took me until the middle of the night. Fortunately they were cut out and mostly pinned, but I was still getting a bit bleary-eyed and some of the hems are very wavy. They are for Number One Daughter. I had better not give them to her until we have had a couple of bottles of the college Prosecco.
They also smell a bit suspiciously of Hideous Moth Death Poison.
I have taken them downstairs and left them in the conservatory to air.
I am sure she will hardly notice.
