There are a very lot of people here.
I will be surprised if I get time to write very much at all. That is to say, I am hoping that I don’t get time to write very much. It would be very nice to have made our fortunes before bedtime.
Oliver is planning to make a fortune. He is on the door of the pub opposite the taxi rank, after which he will be off to Coniston to do an all-night shift watching a pub whose fire alarm has broken. He has got to go into the pub and check it every hour.
We have made a bed up for him in the back of his car. He can sleep in between making sure that the pub does not burn down.
He will not be back at home until seven o’clock tomorrow morning.
He is going to be exhausted. He has been helping us at the new shed all day, and it has been jolly busy, I can tell you.
The difficulty, apart from the too-small door, which has been Mark’s concern of the day, is that the farmer whose farm it once was, used to use the shed for storing bedding. This would have been all right if it had been straw, but it wasn’t. It was sawdust.
It is absolutely everywhere. The walls, which are rough stone, are thickly coated with a layer of it. The floor is so thickly strewn with it that it is soft underfoot, and it has all got to come out, because sawdust and welders do not make a good pairing. They tend to be inflammatory.
Oliver and I have been sweeping the walls. Sawdust has been coming off in thick clouds, and we were filthy. I am still filthy, but Oliver had a shower, because of having to spend the rest of the night looking menacing outside pubs. It is not easy to appear respectably threatening when one resembles a recent escapee from a collapsed building.
We filled the trailer with buckets and buckets of sawdust, and then hauled it around the back of the shed to dump on the bonfire pile.
We have nowhere near finished. There is at least another trailer load to go.
Mark has been reconstructing the door. He has told me several times what he is doing, although I am not yet quite sure what it was. He is taking a large piece of wood out and replacing it with one a foot higher. Oliver and I had to go home before he had finished, and so I did not see the end result, but he says that he has almost finished, and that maybe tomorrow we will be able to get the van in there.
This is very exciting.
I think I am going to like the new shed very much. There are about a dozen house martins living in the eaves, and the yard was alive with their calls today, presumably because like every other bird at this time of year, they are falling in love and considering starting a family. There are dropped sticks everywhere in Windermere, and every chimney has a bird sitting on the top, peering speculatively into the abyss below. I have every sympathy. Bringing up a family is a consuming sort of project.
I used the camper van today. I cooked us some bacon and eggs, because Oliver, who might be growing again, was ravenous by the middle of the afternoon.
This was both happy and terribly sad, using the camper van, I mean, not feeding Oliver. Oliver is eating like a starving wolf at the moment, but there is nothing sad about it, except that I really do not want to have to fork out for some new shoes if he suddenly outgrows these.
It was sad because it was suddenly very apparent just how crumbly it has become. It is exhausted. We could not go on holiday in it because it is no longer fit to go anywhere.
It is weary.
We are going to restore it. It is sitting sadly on the yard outside the shed, but soon all of its rust will be scrubbed away. The rotted bits will be sawn out, and it will be made beautiful again. It can have some new shiny bits, and some paint, and everything will be all right again, and we will be able to call it Lazarus.
It might take some time.
