I am late starting to write in these pages because I have been talking on the telephone for the last two hours.
Oliver has got his Army interview in a couple of days, and we have been going over and over the right answers to the sort of ghastly questions that interviewers ask, from Why Do You Want To Be An Army Officer? to Tell Me About A Time When You Had To Take The Lead.
I am very glad it is Oliver and not me. He has only been around for twenty years compared to my sixty, but if pushed I doubt I would be able to think of any occasions at all when I had to take the lead. If surrounded by people who need to be told what to do, my general solution is to buzz off quietly out of the way and leave them to it.
However, it has been a jolly good few days.
We have been dashing off to the camper van at every possible opportunity, and the picture shows you what we have achieved.
It is a perfectly window-shaped hole in the side of it.
We know that it is perfectly window-shaped because we have tried the window in it, and it slid in like Cinderella’s foot into the inexplicably glazed slipper.
Well, it did the second time, anyway, after Mark had ground the edges down a bit more.
We are feeling very pleased indeed.
We have occupied our mornings drinking coffee and loafing about in bed, talking about camper vans and teaching Guffy the savage kitten to hunt my fingers and not the dogs’ tails. She is getting very good at this, I have been punctured in a dozen places, the rats in the back yard had jolly well better enjoy their ratty little lives whilst they still can, because death and mayhem will be unleashed before the summer is out.
After that we have rushed around to complete the day’s chores before abandoning Guffy to dig up the plants in the conservatory and taking the dogs off to the shed.
The dogs have not enjoyed this at all. It has been so terribly cold that they have simply jumped back into the boot of the car and stayed there, tightly curled up on their cushion under a set of Mark’s overalls.
I did not enjoy the cold very much either. I have been wearing every item of insulation that I can summon, from my thermal vest to my cashmere jersey, with a set of Mark’s old overalls on the top for good measure. These are warm, but otherwise a fairly rubbish sartorial choice, not least because the sleeves and legs are all about a foot too long and the crotch comes down to somewhere around my knees. This last means that I have to concentrate very hard just to succeed at basic skills like walking, never mind climbing up and down ladders and welding.
I welded the last of the window frame together and then ground off the worst of the knobbly bits with the grinder, so it actually looks as though it has been done by somebody who knows how to do welding, even the joints that were a bit out of my reach where I had to balance on a box and lean over.
In the end all of the supports were done, and Mark drilled some holes and poked the jigsaw through, and we took it in turns to cut along as carefully as we could.
We got the corners right by putting a piece of cardboard against the corner of the window and carefully tapping around it so that it left an imprint, and Mark drew it on to the inside of the van. Then he welded the doorframe together whilst I scrubbed all the old glue off the window with a wire brush on the end of the drill.
We would have liked to glue the new window in but we didn’t have time because of work, and we were late for that anyway. We will do that on Tuesday. We can’t do it tomorrow because we have got to have another Consolidation Day, the tedious sort with laundry and putting tyres on the car.
You have got to do these things sometimes, even when you would rather be making holes in a camper van.
I can hardly tell you how very exciting it all is. We would be the most tedious guests at a dinner party at the moment, because we can barely even think about anything else.
Perhaps you have noticed.
