We have been out for the whole day and I have come home to find that somebody has been interfering with my computer.
Somebody has been walking all over the keyboard, opening things and turning the brightness up and generally being a pawprinty nuisance.
There are three possible candidates but only one serious suspect.
I have come back to my computer at eleven at night and been obliged to spend ten minutes reorganising it before I could think about even starting to write to you.
It has been a busy day.
We have been travelling.
We started off with a trip to Wigan, where we collected the new windows for the camper van. This has been fraught with difficulty because the window man’s daughter, who does all of the organising, has gone off to have a baby. The window man is clearly much better at making windows than at organising paperwork, and indeed, none of it was organised.
They found the windows in the end, and we have got them waiting in the back of the car, ready to be installed in the next few days. It is very exciting indeed. They are in boxes and we have not yet had a chance to look at them, but they are our splendid new windows and will make the camper van feel bright and filled with airy daylight.
Obviously the holes in the roof do that already, but this will be an official sort of daylight, the sort that you can appreciate whilst drinking your morning coffee instead of the sort that makes you wonder if an umbrella might be a good idea.
The day had already started off on a very positive note, because we woke up to find an entirely unexpected email from the Norwegian tax authority, telling us that they had refunded the tax that Mark had overpaid them last year. I have been aware of this, and occasionally pursued them on the subject, without much enthusiasm, because few topics could be said to be less engaging than arguing about tax in Norwegian. Indeed, my understanding of the Norwegian tax regulations is just about as extensive as my knowledge of molecular chemistry, and possibly supported by even less curiosity.
To my surprise, an inspection of our bank led us to the very happy discovery that we were four hundred and thirty eight pounds richer than we had expected to be, and so wasted the first hour of the day drinking coffee and contemplating solar panels for the camper van roof.
Sometimes life is just filled with serendipity.
After Wigan we carried on south and went to see my mother. We are supposed to be installing functioning wifi in her house at some point, when we have managed to extract the necessary parts from Mark’s friend Ted, who has promised to arrange it but been so entirely rushed off his feet with the rest of life that he keeps forgetting and then feeling uncomfortably guilty.
I sympathise with this. My mother asked me to bring some cuttings from our geranium and I forgot all about it.
We drank coffee and ate rather more sticky cake than was strictly good for my continuation as a Size Ten, before going into the woods and Mark gave my mother a brief tutorial in using her chainsaw. She will be ninety in a couple of birthdays, which is rather late for a chainsawing apprenticeship, but actually she did rather well, and after a little while she was ploughing through branches, if not with ease, certainly with the beginnings of confidence, which made us jolly impressed.
Afterwards we all went down to Lucy’s, and my mother helped us to unload the trailer. We had filled this with the logs that Mark and Oliver split the other day, and they all needed to be lugged across the road and stacked around the back of the house.
I watched her with some misgivings. I have planned for my own approach to my centenary to be the time of life when I can be as idle as I like with a completely clear conscience, but it looks as though it might have to wait until after it.
Lucy and Jack are planning to get married, which provided a topic for some discussion over cups of tea afterwards. I suspect it will be much discussed in these pages as well, so you need not feel that you are missing out. I will keep you posted.
We were on the way home when an email arrived from the finance company which handles offshore Norwegian payments for the oil companies.
They thought there was a possibility that Mark might be owed some Norwegian tax.
For the small consideration of three hundred and seventy five pounds they would be happy to investigate this on our behalf.
We laughed.
