I am still writing on the old website, and although I know the new one is now in existence, I can’t actually write anything on it.
I don’t know which one you are seeing. If it is the new one then this post will not be there. If it is the old one, and if you are reading this on Sunday night or Monday morning, then it is the old one, please be patient, the upgrade will happen soon.
It is half past nine, and I have wasted the last two hours trying to work out how to write something in my own, newly updated diary, to no avail, and so this might be a hasty few words. This is because I have got bored with it all now and I have got a very interesting book about psychopaths to read, and a lecture about Dark Matter to watch, and so I might become fed up of composition very quickly.
We have not been leading a very exciting life anyway. We both went on the walk over the fell with the dogs this morning, contemplating what we are going to do to occupy ourselves when we get to our retirement, and decided that the important thing was to finish the camper van, in order to occupy ourselves with loafing about on beaches and drinking red wine, all of which sounds very appealing.
The fabric for making the bed-head arrives tomorrow, and I am ridiculously excited. I have got a button-pressing machine, and I have been watching videos on YouTube about exactly what you are supposed to do to cover buttons in sumptuous velvet luxury.
Velvet is horribly costly. It would actually be cheaper to have covered the buttons in sumptuous five pound notes.
I am a bit concerned to see that it all looks ridiculously simple. I suspect there are an awful lot of ways in which it could be expensively messed up by an enthusiastic amateur.
I might have a trial run with an old sheet first.
We spent yesterday doing things to the camper van, actually. We have taken the back window out. This was a complicated exercise and I am trying not to think how I am going to explain to Mark that I have lost an important screw. I put it in my pocket but think I might have accidentally put it in the rubbish with a collection of unimportant screws.
The window was screwed in with some ancient and very rusty screws. I managed to get most of them out and then Mark drilled into the rest of them until they disintegrated to become small dusty patches. After that we had to heat it all up and cut it out with the jiggly tool.
This was harder than it sounds, not least because the bottom of the window was at Mark’s head height, and the top was at the head height of one of those prehistoric gorillas which might not really have existed but which were the biggest primates ever if they did. I would not have wanted to meet one, even if it had been in a cheery mood.
We balanced on some wobbly ladders and breathed in the exciting fumes until it was out and we had a large and only mildly alarming hole. Mark says that he will fill it in with his welding machine, and we will cut a new hole for the window, unscrewed as it is, although he doesn’t know that, in the side of the van.
Really I don’t know why the young people of Bowness bother spending so much cash with the drug dealer who lives just behind the carpet shop. I managed to feel entirely peculiar just with a blow torch and a thick layer of Sikkaflex, and it didn’t make me want to undress in the street or get in a fight with a policeman either.
The next bit to be unglued is the edge of the roof. This leaks, because the join between the walls and the roof is cracked and patchy, and we have ordered both some Sikkaflex for re-glueing it, and a large tin of anti-Sikkaflex for cleaning it all up first.
It is going to mean some more dizzying afternoons, clinging to the tops of ladders inhaling mind-expanding intoxicants.
It sounds splendid.
