I am feeling very happy indeed with my little world.
The hyacinths have opened, along with the daffodils, and the house is smelling glorious. Every time I walk into a room their fresh, soapy scent is the first thing I notice. Also I did get round to hoovering yesterday so there aren’t any base notes of dog hair and mud to level it off a bit.
The sun has been shining. I can’t tell you how happy this has made me. I actually took off my coat on our walk this morning, and strolled along in the warm sunshine just as if I didn’t have a single care in the world, which actually I haven’t, not really, because on the whole life is going jolly well at the moment. The children are all doing nicely, and I don’t have any looming worries anywhere. Of course we don’t have any money, because of having spent it all on our Cambridge extravaganza, and on hyacinths and smoked mackerel, but this does not matter because Mark will get paid tomorrow and so we will even be solvent again.
Mark is having a happy time on his oil rig with a team of chaps that he likes, and they are tootling along merrily, fixing leaks and generally being pals together. This is a relief because there was a mad nutter on his last job which made everybody’s life a bit uncomfortable.
Having had a splendidly sunny walk, I came home to the hyacinth-smell, pegged the washing out in the glorious sunshine, and went off for a sociable coffee with my friend who lives down the road. She happens to be the mother of one of Lucy’s friends, and so we had a happy hour exchanging offspring-related stories. She is trying to sell her house and was expecting some people to come and view it, and so the smell of fresh coffee was actually an asset even after we had drunk it, and I could go away with the satisfactory feeling that my presence had contributed something useful to their fortunes.
After that I went to the garage to use their excitingly foamy jet wash on my taxi, which had become so grimy that I had been beginning to have difficulty seeing out of the windows. Of course it has been all the way to Cambridge and back this week, not to mention several intermediate nights taking people with bad legs home from the taxi rank. I do not usually trouble myself with the condition of the outside of the taxi, which is not something that I often need to look at, but it is comforting now that I am getting elderly to be able to see where I am going, and also the sun was shining, and it seemed like a happy opportunity to be productive and outdoors all at the same time. Anyway I like the squirty guns at the garage car wash. They are ace fun to use and I did not get my trousers very wet at all.
I hoovered it out as well when I got home, and sprayed the inside with the divine perfume from the Disneyland Hotel. We purchased two bottles of this when we were last there, years and years ago, and we are now on the second bottle. I am trying to eke this out as slowly as I possibly, possibly can, since we might not be going there again for a while, or indeed maybe not ever at all, now that the children are grown up and have developed sophisticated adult taste in holidays. I have never managed to achieve that splendid state of maturity, and probably I will have to persuade Number One Daughter to lend us Ritalin Boy if we can ever afford to go there again.
When my taxi was sparkling clean, or at least, less stickily grubby, I turned my attention to the house. I watered the conservatory and swept and mopped the kitchen, after which I dived upstairs to write another thousand words of my story before work.
I am at work now, in a taxi which still smells wonderfully reminiscent of lovely holidays. I have got a beautifully tidily clean house to go home to in a little while, full of the scent of fresh flowers, line-dried washing and newly-mopped floors. I have spent much of the day outside in the glorious spring sunshine. I have had smoked mackerel and russet apples for my taxi picnic, and really I do not think that life could be very much nicer than this.
It is springtime, and it is marvellous.
