It has been an anti-climactic sort of a day.
After yesterday was so filled with thrills after the excitement of completing the bed head, I am sorry to reveal that today has been disappointingly mundane.
It was almost sad to wake up and realise that there was no bed head needing to be made, no exciting moment to look forward to when all the chores had been rushed through. Even worse, there was rather a lot of clearing up to do after several weeks of heady upholstery.
On top of that tragic awakening, it had been Bank Holiday and we were tired.
I think we are getting old, certainly we are getting grumpy.
I do not like bank holidays. We were late to bed, about half past four actually, after all of the noise and nuisance of taking the touristy revellers back to their boarding houses. If I had paid two hundred quid to stay in a Lake District bedroom overnight I would jolly well want more of my money’s worth than that. If you don’t crawl back into it until three in the morning then almost everything you have paid has been completely wasted, and there is no making up for it even if you are sick in the rubbish bin. You might as well have booked yourself a spot under a bench in the Library Gardens for the last couple of hours before breakfast.
Anyway, lots of people wasted their investment in exactly that manner, and so we were out until very late indeed.
The problem with this was that when we woke up at ten, mostly just for the old-person visits to the bathroom, the world was on the go outside our window. Everybody was wagging past in the sunshine, and we could not nod off again, as if somehow we were missing something.
We had a weary cup of coffee and gazed blearily out at the passers by, trying to organise dogs and children and rucksacks and wishing that they had not had the last half a dozen drinks, and probably wondering how all their cash had vanished as well.
The Lake District is a really good place to go for getting rid of your cash, I can tell you. We have been helping with that bit.
The dogs and Guffy the kitten joined us on the bed for coffee. Guffy was not sleepy, and relieved her frustration at everybody else’s inactivity by hunting the dogs. This was not difficult, they are large and smelly and easy to discover. Unfortunately they do not like their tranquil morning snooze to be disturbed by tiny but immensely sharp nuisances, and we had to keep batting her away as she hurled herself, teeth and claws bared, at the occasional exposed ear or tail. Once Roger Poopy forgot himself enough to issue a warning growl, at which point she spat back, crossly, and we had to separate them gently before they forgot the code of civilised conduct which is required of all creatures with bed-visiting permissions.
Eventually we could no longer justify such idle loafing about, and had to get up and start doing things. Mark went to the farm to haul firewood, and I started to do some cleaning, because after all, it is still Monday and Clean Sheets Day.
It was so sunny that the sheets dried on the line, although it was very late before they actually arrived there, and even the towels, which were later still, were almost dry before we came to work tonight.
I swept up all of the bed head clutter, which was considerable, there were bits of foam rubber and wadding and discarded staples all over the place, who would have thought that upholstery was such a messy business. After that I mopped up about a month’s worth of ignored muddy footprints, and scrubbed out the dog bowls, since the dogs were not around to leave paw marks in the clean bits nor to become anxious about their disappeared bowls. Then when Mark came back we went upstairs and cleaned up together.
He brought me some daffodils back from the farm. He planted these for me a few years ago, and they are doing very nicely now, so we filled the bedroom and office with flowers, which made everywhere feel fresh and bright, as if the cleaning had really been worth it, which probably it wasn’t, really, dust seems to seep out of the very walls in our house. It is only a week since I dusted but the cloth was still black and we have got the sort of dusting machines that suck dust out of the air as well
In the end it was done, which was a relief, because we were feeling very elderly by then, and would have liked to stay in the fresh-smelling bedroom for a little snooze, but of course we didn’t.
It is still bank holiday, so of course we are on the taxi rank.
There are not many people left now, it is almost over.
I will be jolly glad when it is.
