In furtherance of the cleaning theme, I have cleaned the windows.
I have not cleaned all of the windows, not even nearly. Actually I have only cleaned our bedroom window and the office window, which is two of them. There are a very lot more to go, not least because we have got a conservatory.
Conservatories are made of windows, inside and outside. I am really not looking forward to that chore, poor Future Me.
The cleaning was because of the sunshine. It was beaming merrily down on us this morning and we realised that we could not actually see out.
This was a shameful experience.
Shameful for me, that is. Mark did not seem to mind in the least. He just shrugged and said that there must have been dust blowing in from the Sahara.
It is the only thing that has blown in from the Sahara if it was. Certainly it has not brought any warm dry air with it.
Hence when I had finished all of my other daily tasks this evening I set to remedying the Saharan dumpings before I had to go to work.
The bedroom was not too bad. It was only filthy.
The office, on the other hand, was dreadful.
We have something of an ongoing difficulty with our horticultural pastimes, in that everything we have ever grown has turned into something resembling the plant in Little Shop Of Horrors, the one that takes over the whole place and shouts Feed Me Eugene occasionally.
I do not know how other people manage this sort of problem. I do not think that people dig plants up and simply throw them away, indeed, I am not quite sure where we might throw them in any case.
We would need a very large dustbin.
Anyway, there is a very large and prolific ivy growing up the back wall of our house. It is the sort of thing you might get if you had just planted a handful of beans that you had exchanged for your cow.
I went to stand in the alley to inspect it but discovered that I could not see it because the bay tree in the back yard is now about twenty feet tall and providing us with what estate agents call seclusion and privacy, by which they mean that it keeps all the sun off the washing line.
The ivy was growing over the office windows.
It was growing so thoroughly that it would not have been an unreasonable expectation that one might, on hacking one’s way past the colossal bay tree, the four metre high geranium and the huge and aptly named Monstera, find Sleeping Beauty having an afternoon snooze on the sofa.
I had to drag the massive Elephant’s Foot palm off the windowsill first. It was a present from Number One Son-In-Law some years ago, when it was but a sprig.
It is now easily large enough to support an elephant, and is becoming squished against the ceiling. I am going to have to put it somewhere else soon, because it is beginning to spread itself all over my desk.
I balanced on the windowsill and trimmed back the ivy. Then I scrubbed its sticky footprints off the window.
I had to wash the windowsill on the inside afterwards as well. You still can’t see the one on the outside.
Afterwards I looked upwards and realised that Lucy’s bedroom window, on the floor above the office, was even worse.
Lucy is not here, so it can be a problem for another day. There will come a day when I am seized with a fit of ruthlessness and
Apart from that, I am pleased to tell you that I made a visit to the hospital this morning to have the stitches taken out of my eyelids.
I was not sorry to see them go, not that I did see them go, because of having my eyes shut. There were lots and lots of them, I think the surgeon did a sort of buttonhole stitch, and did a jolly good job, he could easily have made a decent go at a Van Dyke seam if he had wanted. I tried to tell the doctor that my eyes are still sore, but she just shrugged the sort of shrug that says What Do You Expect From A Free Health Service Get Bupa If You Want Painless.
I am sure they will get better in the end.
Even with the soreness it is still unspeakably wonderful to be able to see where I am going.
I am very glad indeed to have had it done.
