I am pleased to announce that my taxi is now in possession of an MOT.
I was rather less pleased to get a grumpy email from the council this morning wondering why I had been so unobservant as not to notice that there were things wrong with it before I put it in for the test, to which I responded with equal acerbity, and so I suppose I will be unpopular with them for a while.
Mark went off to the farm to inspect the baby birds and to continue with his packing up this morning whilst I took the taxi back to the MOT station. They didn’t have time to look at it straight away, and rather to my discomfiture I had to leave it there again. Mark was still at the farm, so I trailed off miserably, over the wretched railway bridge and across to the bus stop, at which point he turned up to rescue me just as the bus was pulling up.
I was rather glad about that.
We went across to the shed, where Mark was building new shelves and I started the laborious process of packing the van up.
We have got to take everything out of it if we are going to rebuild it. This causes something of a problem, because our house is already bursting at the seams. Obviously we have a quilt on our bed in the house, and another on the bed in the camper van. There are cups hanging on the hooks at home, and more cups hanging on the hooks in the camper van, and so on. This is to save us having to empty the house every time we want to go anywhere. Such an undertaking would be fraught with the perils of forgetfulness and recrimination, and therefore it has always been better to have two of everything.
I might add that we also had two of everything that the children took to boarding school, so in fact Lucy had three quilts, one on her bed at home, one that went to school, and a third in the camper van. That meant that between Lucy and Oliver we had six quilts and lots and lots of linens, not to mention all of the other detritus that children collect to take everywhere with them, like dressing gowns and raincoats and so on.
There is not room in the house for any more clutter.
Hence it is all going to have to stay in the shed, and with this in mind I have purchased some large vacuum storage bags and some even larger plastic boxes, to deter mice.
Today I started decanting it all into the storage bags.
It was an odd, and surprisingly emotional experience.
Of course everything in the camper van has its own little history, its own story and collection of happy memories, and I was prepared for that. It has long been a repository for nostalgic clutter. Oliver was fourteen before I could finally force myself to sling out its collection of dummies and baby-bottles.
Today’s packing was not quite so embarrassing, but unexpectedly touching for all that.
Today I discovered that somebody very much poorer than I am had carefully darned, ironed, and folded a collection of snowy-white bedding, laid incense sticks between it for the wonderful scent, and packed it tidily away on a back shelf, ready for emergency use as a second set should any misfortune befall the ones on the bed. I recognised the sheets.
They were so worn that I would hardly have given them house room as dishcloths, probably today they would have progressed instantly to the dog-sick-cloth pile. I remembered buying them, about twenty years ago, and how much I had treasured their pleasing softness.
They had been so lovingly looked after that I felt a bit embarrassed by my relative wealth compared to the determined pauper I had been when I stored them so carefully ten years ago. Of course they had worn far too thin to be used by the far more affluent person that I have now become, but I could not bring myself to throw them out all the same. They had been left as a present for me to find in a dark hour, and it seemed terribly ungrateful not to carry on cherishing them.
I am going to have to use them for cloths really, I suppose, they have worn so thin that they won’t last much longer on the beds, and I have no wish to spend any more of my life darning holes in sheets.
All the same, it was a lovely thing to find.
Somebody must have really wanted me to find them and feel happy.
Well, I did.
