Guffy the tiresome kitten will not eat the free food that the vet gave her.
This is very naughty of her, because the food contains all of the nutrients to turn her into a normal-sized healthy cat instead of the runty weed that she is at the moment. She is now thirteen weeks old but the vet did not believe me about this. Also if you have got to buy it instead of having it given to you it is very expensive indeed so she might as well make the most of it.
Rosie thinks it smells very nice and has been eyeing it up hopefully.
Instead Guffy has drunk all of the paint water and eaten the skin off the fish that I put in my sandwiches for my taxi picnic. She had a bit of the fish as well, and all of the jelly left over in the tin after I cooked some chicken for when Mark comes home tomorrow.
The dogs helped with the chicken, eating it, not cooking it, obviously.
Mark is home tomorrow, and I am looking forward to it. I have mostly tidied up, the hearth is full of firewood and more or less everything that is supposed to be clean is clean.
I have had a busy day. Apart from the cooking I went to the Post office to purchase some more stamps before they go up again at weekend. They are shockingly expensive now, a first class stamp is going to cost £1.80, which is a very, very lot, I do not know how the Royal Mail imagines it can be a reasonable competitor for emails, which are free and do not get piled up at the sorting office for a fortnight.
Our mail gets out to us pretty quickly, actually. This morning John the postman and I stood scratching our heads over a parcel for the end house which had the wrong surname on it, and it is a holiday house anyway. I rang the chap with the holiday house and he explained that it was his wife’s surname. This is because they live in London where they have different ideas. If you kept the same surname here then people would think you were odd, and a few of the people who are very, very local, the sort whose families married their cousins, would tell you so.
In other news, I have occupied some of the day writing letters to the council, who telephoned me straight back, because the letters were emails, not the sort that need stamps, and so they got them straight away not next week. The council man, whom I like, sighed wearily, and explained that they were already doing their best to make Uber follow the rules and would be enforcing absolutely everything that was enforceably possible, with an iron enforceful fist. Of course I knew this already, and have been trying to explain it to some of the other drivers, who are completely convinced that Uber are still here because they are issuing fat bribes to the council, who no doubt would be driving larger cars and wearing more expensive suits if this was really the case.
Apart from that, and here is my exciting event of the day, the upholstery is properly motoring along, and I have tufted the very first buttons.
It is a jolly lot harder than it looks on YouTube, I can tell you. First you have to get the needle through the hole in the board, then through all of the foam, which has got a prearranged hole in it already, but which I have stuffed with more bits of foam in order that the buttons do not just disappear into the cushion. The needle is massive. It is a foot long, which it needs to be, because otherwise it would just vanish in a spongy mystery of bed head innards. This caused some frustration when I discovered that it would not fit through the holes in the back of the buttons, so I had to unthread it once it had got to the button bit, and thread a smaller needle to poke the thread through the buttons, and then re-thread the big one again. This was a nuisance but I was prepared to suffer in the cause of my Art so it was all right.
I have got a special stapling machine for fastening the velvet on. It is very exciting. You have to connect it to the compressor in the yard with a long tube, and it blows the staples out with a puff of air and a surprisingly understated click. It went off once at the wrong moment, and fired a staple into the flower bed, and also I accidentally stapled the velvet to the table a couple of times, but apart from that it has gone well.
It makes an exciting bang when you disconnect it and frightened the dogs off the sofa.
I am sorry to say that it is not going to be a good job, because my creases are going to be very uneven. This is because I am an inexpert novice, also an idiot. I have left the staples very loose on the back so that I can try and pull things tight afterwards, but my lack of upholstering ability shows shockingly badly.
I will get better as I go on. By the time I get to the end of the bedhead they will be perfect.
We will just have to pile the pillows up in the middle.
PS. I have called this entry Tufty, after the buttons and also the squirrel. Old people will remember him. His job was not to get squished on the road, I think, which is doing better than one on the road this morning which had a very narrow escape.
