I am almost clean and tidy ready for Mark’s return.
Almost everywhere – not quite everywhere, because there is still a little bit of week left – is polished and gleaming and smelling of beeswax and lavender. Our bedroom has been polished twice. This is not really because the bedroom is deserving of any extra-special attention. Generally when we get into it, not only is it dark, but usually we have been rushing about arguing with drunk taxi customers for the preceding few hours, and in consequence we are too tired to do anything but crawl sleepily into bed and pass out.
I can promise you that if Mark is thinking about anything other than sleep at that moment, it is certainly not the shining clean state of the furniture.
Nevertheless, it is a week since I did it and once again a light covering of dust was beginning to drift over it, so today I polished everything all over again.
I am feeling satisfied, even if I am the only one who ever notices.
In fact I have been having a day of bedroom improvements.
Today I dragged out the enormous rotary iron and ironed all of our sheets.
It is years since I did this, having discovered that I sleep just as soundly between wrinkly sheets as between flat ones. All the same, we have had several adventures in smart hotels over the years, and the crisply immaculate state of the bed linen has always been an especially happy moment at the end of the day, and so today I decided I would duplicate it at home.
I had dragged the iron out last week already, as part of the spring cleaning, and scrubbed away the accumulated grey snowfall of dust and fluff and dead spiders. I replaced the rotor cover and thought that it might be a nice thing to use it occasionally, so today I put a Cormoran Strike story on the story-telling thing and ironed all of our sheets.
It is a nicely soothing thing to do, especially pillowcases. Fitted sheets are tiresomely complicated and never come out looking properly flattened, although at least the worst bits are at the ends and don’t show too much.
I scented it all with cologne whilst I was doing it, and they are crisp and smooth and beautiful.
Mark will not be back until Friday for the crisply-cologned-sheet experience, but I do not sleep on his side of the bed, so probably it will still be all right by then.
It is Bank Holiday Monday, and the exciting tourist experience is almost over, indeed, probably by the time I get out to work it will be completely over and everybody will have gone home. I am not at all sorry about this. It will be nice to be able to reverse onto the taxi rank without people determinedly shoving pushchairs behind the taxi and bending down in the middle of the road to tie up their shoelaces. Windermere was gridlocked this morning, with a long stream of cars queueing up to get through the roadworks which the Gas Board has inexplicably chosen to site in the middle of the village for the whole of the bank holiday, closing off the main road. I should think the person who made the decision went off to Marbella or somewhere, and had a quiet chuckle to themselves every time they thought about it.
I am not at work yet. I am writing to you from the tranquil silence of my office at home. This is not because I am expecting to be rushed off my feet with tourist transport requirements, but because I have had a busy day and am very much looking forward to the part of it where I sit down and drink tea and don’t do anything very much unless somebody with a bad leg comes along. I have got a good book and think that I might very much enjoy a complete shirk in the evening sunshine.
Of course it is still Double Time. With any luck I will make enough to go shopping tomorrow.
I am going to go off and loaf about the taxi rank.
