Our visitors have gone.
I have enjoyed their company very much, but it is also very nice to have our lives settling down into something a bit more peaceful.
Of course you will remember that we have been living the high life in Manchester as well as entertaining guests, and so you will appreciate that life has been full of excitement all week. I am not at all sorry to be on the taxi rank, gazing peacefully out at the hordes of passing tourists, and feeling glad that it is they, and not me, having the adventure. I do not want to be having any more thrills for a little while.
Today was a little bit thrilling because of the guests. Amanda came with me on my walk this morning whilst Mark and Jez fed themselves on quantities of sausages with brown sauce and then strolled off for a walk of their own. We had half an hour together when we all got back, and then we walked back with them to the place they had left their car, and off they went.
They did not want to leave their car at our house because it is a Ferrari. Hence it is too wide for the alley and a bit upmarket for the road at the front of the house. I could see that it was a very beautiful car, and apparently has a lovely leathery smell inside, but I was not sorry that our own cars are so scruffy that we never have the smallest anxiety about parking them anywhere. Mine is especially scruffy at the moment because we seem to have had an extremely large and incontinent bird nesting somewhere in the wall about their parking spaces. I think it must have been at least as big as an albatross, and possibly dining on the leftovers from the Indian restaurant. The results are not lovely.
I am very glad my car is not a Ferrari. I would have been very upset indeed to have something so gloriously shiny become so hideously bespattered.
As it was I barely noticed.
When they had roared off into the sunset, which I should explain is a mere figure of speech because it was only lunchtime really, we went home and got on with things. Mark went round to the front of the house where he and the painter man have joined forces in an attempt to make the front of the house look shiny and perfect and just like Disneyland, and in the process talked so much that by the end of the afternoon they were ordering stuff from Autoparts together. This, I think, is rather like women sharing nail varnish and telling one another that their bottoms really don’t look big in tight jeans.
I left them to it, apart from supplying the occasional cup of coffee, and went up to the top floors of the house. The guests’ bedroom had to be stripped out and cleaned because Number Two Daughter is coming to visit next week, so it was a good job that the sun was shining because there were three loads of washing altogether.
I got it all dry and felt very pleased with my housewifely virtue although of course it was thanks to the Weather Gods really.
After that I cooked more sausages and then went up to the loft because of the post-Manchester ironing.
That was not nearly as wearisome as it sounds, because I opened the skylight wide so that the lovely warm afternoon poured in, and put the storytelling thing on my telephone.
Then I spent the next few hours making everything respectably flat and tidy whilst listening contentedly to an interesting detective yarn. I had read it before, possibly twice, and so I knew perfectly well who had Dun It, but it did not matter because of picking out which bits were carefully-laid clues that the author had helpfully included, and scowling about the ones that I thought were cheats, like the crucial clue to the murder being a photograph, which we as readers could not see, and so obviously were not going to guess, which I thought was not fair. The point of a good detective story is that you have got all of the information that the detective has, but he works out who has Dun It but you don’t because of not concentrating hard enough.
This one was a bit spurious and I suspected that the author might not have quite decided herself who had Dun It until about halfway through. I did not mind this. I have written similar stories myself. It is fine as long as you go back and make sure the clues get added to the earlier bits as well.
Anyway, it was a contented and tranquil afternoon, at the end of which I had a pile of neatly-folded flat clothes, so I think we can count it a success.
Also Mark and the painter man are doing very nicely with the front of the house.
The front door is still lying in the garden.
Fortunately nobody seems to want to steal it yet.
