I am All Systems Go, Full Speed Ahead, like the Starship Enterprise heading off on a tricky new mission to boldly eye up young ladies in mini-skirts and rescue them from Klingons.
I am at Warp Speed.
I am not going on a new mission. I am rushing to get the old mission finished, which is to have everything tidied up and ready for Mark’s return. At the time of writing this is believed to be tomorrow.
I am only saying that it is believed to be, because there is a delicate balance with these things, and it could easily not go according to plan. A foggy morning in the North Sea could see them stranded for the next week.
I am hoping that the Weather Gods have no such hilarious plans, and hence I am dashing about doing the things that can only be done at the last minute.
Mostly that has been cooking. Mark is unlikely to be satisfied with my current preferred diet of smoked mackerel and lettuce, and so today I have cooked sausages and chicken and shoved a lamb joint and potatoes into the slow cooker.
That is still slow cooking even as I write. I have got to remember to turn it off before I go to bed.
I was not at all sorry to have put the oven on, because the day has been terribly cold, indeed, some camping customers told me this evening that there had been a frost on the tents when they woke up this morning. Most certainly there was no opportunity for collecting Vitamin D on my wrinkly legs, and I was so cold when I got back from my walk this morning that I did not really warm up for the rest of the day. My fingers were chilled and clumsy, like enormous cooked prawns, which turned into a nuisance when I tried to do anything fiddly, and the attempt to insert a light bulb into Lucy’s bathroom light fitting defeated me in the end.
This was partly because the light fitting was designed by a complete idiot who had never tried replacing a lightbulb whilst balancing precariously on a wobbly stool and trying to jam a tiny fitting into a tiny hole several feet above their head. It is a modern sort of light fitting, with two peculiar protuberances on the end of the lightbulb, not a sensible bayonet which might easily be installed by a monkey on a moonless night. You can’t see either the fitting or the hole and so you have to wiggle the wretched thing about and guess, and all of my guesses were wrong.
I gave up in the end because my arms were aching, and then forgot all about it, so I will have to have another go tomorrow. I will have to do this because it does not seem exactly fair to greet Mark by agreeing that I am pleased to have him home and would he please just pop upstairs, only for him to discover the potentially lethal wobbly stool and the empty light fitting.
I thought afterwards that it was just as well I had given up. If I had fallen off the stool I might have had to stay there until Mark gets home, which would not have been very much of a welcome either.
When I had finished with the last-minute dashing about I had the happy recollection that I needed to sew some hanging loops into our new hand towels, and so ambled upstairs to the attic.
It was warm and peaceful in the attic, because it is at the top of the house and the sun had been shining on the roof. It was full of all of our most beautiful clothes, none of which fit me any more, so I will have to get fat again soon, and I settled very contentedly at my sewing table.
The towels had to be hand-sewn, because the tiresome sewing machine refused to appreciate the fabric, and made such a colossal knotty cotton mess that eventually I gave up on that as well, and sewed them on in the way my grandmother would have done, except that I was gifted with a storytelling thing on my telephone, and then my mother telephoned halfway through as well, so on the whole the afternoon passed very pleasantly indeed.
I was almost sorry when I had finished and had to start getting ready for work.
Mark might be home tomorrow.
I hope the Weather Gods are looking somewhere else.
