I have been painting again.
I have not just been painting, I have been sloshing the paint on with such zeal that a passer by could easily have mistaken me for a minor character from The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, not least because I have now completely ruined my shorts, and they now fit that description rather well. They are now orange with liberally applied pink smears.
I have given all of the paint a second coat. All of the paint that I have done so far, that is. I have not done any more, largely because I am no braver about ladders than I was last week, but sooner or later I am going to have to brave the big ones, the ones that go all the way up to the roof, and which I have hitherto been too cowardly to attempt.
Maybe tomorrow, perhaps.
I have got pink paint everywhere, and had to spend some time with a white-spirity rag wiping it off the steps and the window frame and the window sill, including the bit inside the bedroom, after which I did my feet and my legs and my arms. I have left my hair. Hopefully it will come off in the shower later.
The dogs were being helpful, and milled about the garden companionably, occasionally ambling out into the road to check up on the activities of passers by. After a while Roger Poopy stretched out and went to sleep on the pavement, meaning that everybody had to step over him, making little tutting noises about irresponsible dog owners. I thought about calling him in, but didn’t bother because it was only people on their holidays, and I will never see them again so I don’t care.
I did not spend all day painting. Painting is the last bit, saved for when I have done everything else, as a sort of inverse of a reward. I took the dogs out and opened some newly-purchased second-hand plates that have arrived from the magnificent portals of eBay. They are staggeringly beautiful, but quite surprisingly small, and I remembered that actually, plates used to be that size. I dug out an old plate left over from the very first set of plates that I ever owned, about forty years ago, and indeed, they were exactly the same size, no wonder we are fat these days.
It was Clean Sheets Day, and the day for dumping the weekend’s takings into the Post Office, since we no longer have any banks.
I had a surprise in the Post Office.
This was an unusual experience. Visits to the Post Office tend to be predictable, unless for some reason there is an unexpected absence of queue.
I was waiting with my usual Post Office look of not-quite-unfriendly patience, a look cultivated to indicate that I am happy to wait, which is civilised of me because it is a tedious nuisance and I am busy. It also suggests that I live here and am more or less a sociable person but please don’t talk to me because I am thinking about something else which is more important than your tedious whitterings about the weather.
Somebody tapped me on the shoulder anyway.
To my enormous astonishment, it was my mother-in-law and her best friend.
You will perhaps appreciate the surprising news of this more thoroughly if I explain that although my mother-in-law used to live in Windermere, she has long since decamped, and now lives near her daughters somewhere in Wales, which is where, had I considered the matter, which I confess I hadn’t, I would have expected to find her.
I had certainly not expected to encounter her in the Post Office. I might not have been wearing brilliant orange-and-pink paint-smeared sawn-off dungarees if I had.
She has come up to visit her friend, and will be here for a couple of weeks, she explained, and would like to go out to dinner some time, perhaps to celebrate our joint birthdays.
Her birthday is handily in between mine and Mark’s, and so it will be a three-way event.
Obviously I accepted with enthusiasm, it will be nice to do something to mark my birthday. I will not be sixty every day. Well, actually I will be sixty every day, for all of the next year, but probably I could celebrate its inauguration.
Sixty.
I will be able to join an Over Sixties Club.
