Exciting things just keep on happening.
As you know, Mark has now managed to get the camper van into the new shed, and I have attached a picture for your admiration. We are very pleased about this, because it has come at the end of a long, dry spell, and the van is nicely dry. It is now under cover before it gets wet again.
Poor old van.
Mark has spent this afternoon emptying tools out of his trailer in the field and hauling them up to the new shed. Oliver helped, although not, I suspect, with any great enthusiasm. Oliver has been bouncing this weekend, an activity which has largely seemed to consist of emptying confiscated bags of white powder into the lavatories of the nightclub, and he has retired to his bedroom to sleep it all off.
We are on the taxi rank.
Last night was, as all but the most distracted amongst you will know, Saturday night, and we were very busy indeed, which was ace. We finally crawled into bed just after six this morning, where we lay as unmoving as a couple of trunks of left-behind luggage, until the predictable call of nature aroused us at about half past eleven, when instead of collapsing directly back into oblivion, we were poked by the knobbly finger of guilt into finally crawling back out again for coffee.
It turned out to be a good job that we did, because we had only just poured it and were just beginning to consider innovations to a camper van heating system, when somebody called up the stairs, and it was Number One Son-In-Law, so we got dressed instead.
It was ace to see him. He is going off to the same oil rig as Mark on Tuesday, and so they talked about bulkheads and cracks and mobilisations, which was all very reassuring, I can jolly well promise you that our leaky oil rigs are in safe hands, chaps. Then we showed him our exciting designs for the camper van, and he tried hard to look interested, which I thought was very polite of him. He had brought their dog Tonka with him, but booted all three dogs out into the back yard because tiresome Roger Poopy was so worried at the prospect of some male competition, because Rosie is in enthusiastic season again, that he got into a complete tizz and did a wee in their dog bed.
This did not make him popular with anybody, not even Rosie, and the three of them lurked around the yard, the two chaps growling at one another whilst Rosie tried excitedly to mount them both.
We closed the back door and ignored them.
We had revived quite a bit by the time we had had coffee, which was just as well because twenty minutes later another exciting thing happened.
We have got a chap coming to paint the front of the house.
Not all of the front of the house, of course. It is a Lake District slate house, and I think the National Park would start to get grumpy if we painted it all over. He is coming to paint the window frames and the front door.
As you might know, we never, ever go in and out of the front of the house, with the consequence that we never take any notice of how it is looking. This means that it now looks as if the zombie apocalypse happened about ten years ago and that the zombies who took over did not feel any great inspiration to make a start on any gardening or redecorating.
It is very, very scruffy.
The chap who is doing it is youthful and enthusiastic, certainly compared with me at any rate. He has listened with polite curiosity to my proposed colour scheme of magenta and green, gulped a couple of times and agreed that it would probably be lovely.
He spent the rest of the day balancing on a ladder, scraping a hundred and fifty years’ worth of paint off the window frames.
This was a very lot of layers of paint, although to my surprise, the wood underneath is in absolutely brilliant condition. Not an ounce of damp seems to have touched it, not a finger of mould is to be seen anywhere. The window frames are made of something which Mark says is called Pitch Pine, and they are surprisingly beautiful.
We are going to paint them in magenta and green anyway.
The chap is going to paint it, that is.
I am so pleased about this. I have been dreading this particular job for several years now, whilst all the while the house has been getting scruffier and scruffier.
It is going to look wonderful. Our world is feeling very bright indeed.
Have a picture of a lovely dry camper van.
