We got very wet on our walk this morning, hurrah for the Great British Summertime.
I can think of no very good reason not to move to Portugal, except that we couldn’t earn a living and that we don’t speak the language. Still, the weather would be better, and we could grow olives.
It was a splendid walk, despite the rain, because the first few tadpoles have grown their legs and emerged. We have been watching them for ages, and today was the beginning. There have been a very, very lot of tadpoles this year, the edge of the tarn has been quite black with them, and in a very few more days they will all be gone.
We came home and Oliver peeled his wet things off. I kept mine on, because I had to go to Booths. I thought I might as well get it over and done with straight away, instead of spending half an hour getting undressed and dressed and then quite possibly getting wet all over again, so I squelched off in my sodden boots and dripping trousers, telling myself that it would all be over very soon.
The result was that I rushed, forgot lots of things, and had to go to Sainsbury’s later.
After that I had a day of cooking.
I had intended to finish cleaning the dresser, but the day ran out before I got to it, so it will have to be a job for tomorrow.
There does not seem to be a lot of time to do anything much at the moment. This difficulty is being exacerbated by having to spend ages every morning cleaning up Guffy’s accidents. She is confined to the conservatory, which helps, but still there are horrible poo-splashes all over the place, and the whole place has to be thoroughly disinfected every morning.
I thought this morning, after discovering that the dogs had walked in it and left revolting poo paw prints all over the place, that I couldn’t possibly put up with it any longer, and that a final one-way trip to the vet was going to have to happen: but when I sat down to put my boots on she climbed, purringly, on to my knee and tried to suck my fingers, and of course my resolve melted immediately.
We still have a cat, albeit one with a leak.
I lit the fire, because we had boots and laundry to dry, and because the door needs to be open as much as possible in order to encourage Guffy to spend her afternoons in the Great Outdoors, where her leak does not matter. In fact it stayed tolerably warm, because I had the oven on, and eventually the sun came out as well, so we were not cold, although our boots were so very wet that even propped over the fire they have not yet dried, tomorrow morning is going to be a bit soggily uncomfortable.
I cooked burgers and lamb and chicken, because Oliver’s girlfriend was coming to visit, and some hostessly catering was called for. She arrived this afternoon, looking pale and exhausted because of having travelled by train. The train had been horribly late and she had missed all of her connections, and the journey had taken hours longer than it should have done.
I sympathised enthusiastically.
As somebody once said, if the necessity of using public transport does not make you ambitious to succeed in life, then nothing ever will.
I have occupied my evening, in between customers, who have not been numerous, with gassing to Elspeth on the telephone and contemplating duvet covers on the mighty Internet. Our current sheets have worn into holes, and I had decided that we were sufficiently middle-class for me to purchase new ones rather than merely patching the old, as has been my solution in the past. Indeed, the towels just dispatched to Mark’s workshop to be rags all seem to have small, neat patches on them, how virtuous I must have been.
I reconsidered this approach quite quickly when I discovered that two new sets of the bedding that I liked was going to set us back more than two hundred quid, and so I rather suspect that some more virtue might be in order.
You can’t do sides-to-middling with fitted sheets.
We will just have to take it in turns to sleep on the patched bits.
