No painting today, because of the prolonged and determined efforts of the Weather Gods to wash away the dog poo which somebody tiresome has allowed their dog to leave all over the pavement on Victoria Road North.
They must have managed it by now.
At the very least they seem to have given up, because the world is beginning to dry out, and the forecast for the next few days is looking hopefully benevolent.
I would be glad about that, because there is still quite a bit of painting to be done, and Mark will be home on Friday. I do not wish to look as though I have been wilfully shirking.
I had to come up with other things to do, which was not difficult.
There were some pallets cluttering up the yard which needed to be sawn up, and so I did that. Well, I sawed one of them up. It turned into a complicated and scowling exercise because I could not find the Barbie chainsaw, and had to try and organise getting the pallet into the circular saw a bit at a time. This is too difficult to explain to anybody not familiar with the use of a circular saw, because it involved turning the pallet over and cutting off the most accessible bit, and then turning it again and finding another bit, and it took ages and ages, and quite a lot of swearing, before I had managed to reduce it to stove-sized chunks.
It was a complete nuisance. Pallets are large and heavy.
It was even more of a nuisance because I dropped it on my foot twice. I was only wearing trainers, and so had to hop about and curse energetically, which probably upset the people milling about the holiday house next door.
This was because I had got very wet on my morning dog-emptying outing, and my boots were too sodden and squelchy for me to consider putting them back on. I had realised before I set off that shorts would be a sensible option, since legs dry a lot faster than trousers, but my boots and socks spent the rest of the day steaming in front of the stove, which I had lit. It is not exactly cold, but it is damp and chilly, and in any case I thought I might like hot water. Nothing is as miserable as cheerless, grey summer days, with no fire and no sunshine, and so I had a fire.
I reassured myself for such hedonism with the recollection that probably I deserved it after all of my efforts with the pallets, and noticed later that I was not the only one who had consoled themself for such dreary weather, because I counted half a dozen smoking chimneys on my way to work.
When I had finished I loaded the last of the boxes of camper van things into the taxi, and the dogs into the boot, and we went over to the shed. I splashed through the puddles in the yard and hauled everything down to the enormous pile at the back. Then I had a final hunt through the camper van to check that I really had removed everything and that it was truly empty and ready for demolition.
There were the seat cushions, so I shoved them in the taxi, and the picnic bag, which I left in the shed in case we might need some plastic plates and stripy napkins whilst we were rebuilding the van, but that was more or less it, apart from the tragic discovery of a long-abandoned bucket and spade under one of the seats.
I could not bring myself to throw it away, even though I know perfectly, perfectly well that none of the children will ever want to build sandcastles with Daddy ever, ever again.
There will not be any more holidays in Blackpool, stuffed with doughnuts and candy floss and cycling along the promenade with the dogs belting excitedly after us.
We had brilliant holidays in Blackpool. We went to the Pleasure Beach – which for the benefit of foreign readers I should explain is the fun-fair – so many times that in the end the children actually complained that they would rather do their homework.
The spade was still a bit sandy.
I put it back under the seat.
Some things are worth remembering.
