I did not make curtains today.
Today I dragged myself reluctantly away from the stairs to the attic, and got on with the thing that Really Needed Doing, which was to clean the bottom half of the dresser.
Regular readers will recall that I cleaned the top half absolutely ages ago, and have not bothered to touch it since, despite the secret, guilty knowledge that it was woven about with dusty cobwebs and the gritty grime which is the inevitable consequence of heating one’s house with a wood burning stove.
Sometimes I think that perhaps when I am really old I might retire to the sort of old lady bungalow that is heated by a gas boiler and that just needs turning on, and then occasionally off again in the unusual moments when the sun shines.
It has not shone today. I lit the fire this afternoon. My fingers had become too chilly to wash up.
Since sixty one is not really old enough to sink into a dribbling, labour-free dotage, I have still got the sort of life that demands actual effort, and today I had got to clean the dresser.
It was an interesting sort of project.
The bottom of the dresser is where we keep our alcohol, a sort of low-level drinks cabinet without the ornate glass doors and the very handy key to reduce temptation. We are not tempted very often but once we had something of a misfortune with a cleaner. I could easily have forgiven her secret toping, it was the discovery that she had ruined the rest of the single malt and apple Calvados by topping the bottles up with water, not once, but quite substantially, over several visits.
It was regrettable. She had been a good cleaner when sober, although with a surprising habit of leaving the lavatory door open. I had several moments of walking past the bathroom to discover her sitting cheerfully on the loo, waving to me and calling out snippets of small talk.
Since I do not have a cleaner any more I had got to clean the dresser myself.
I had to take everything off it and polish it.
I discovered that there was a very, very lot of alcohol, all shoved on the dresser in a colossal muddled array of randomly-placed bottles.
There was so much that it was slipping off the shelf.
I started wiping and removing it, carefully.
There were twenty eight bottles of different sorts of wine.
Of course, lots of people give us wine, and of course we purchase it for ourselves as well. What it seems that we have not done lately is drunk very much of it.
Partly this is because I have discovered that drinking wine late at night leads to my waking up, heartburn throbbing pitilessly in my chest, in the middle of the night, and so our wine-drinking activities have been limited to earlier in the evening.
We have very rarely been in the position of being at home in the early evening without needing to go to work afterwards.
Also it was all so very muddled that even if I had wanted to drink wine, it would very probably have been too difficult to find it, and generally I have been too idle, heading directly for the fridge and for the bottles of gin instead.
I looked at the array of bottles and sighed.
Then I put another jersey on over the top of the one I was wearing already, because it is midsummer in the Lake District so I did not need my sheepskin coat, and went off into the village to see if anybody was selling wine racks anywhere.
I came home with some peppers and a pineapple but no wine rack, and was obliged to retreat to the mighty Internet in order to visit Amazon. As it happens Mark’s mother had very kindly sent us a cheque for our joint birthdays, and so there was even some cash in the bank, and I thought that a wine rack might make a very splendid present for us.
It will arrive tomorrow. I have scrubbed out the corner in which it will stand, which was also a fairly grim and distasteful job, being full of black mould and fleeing spiders.
I have put the bottles in the corner, ready for their new home, and tidied up the dresser. It looks rather splendid now, actually like a real drinks cabinet might do, and I have discovered that there are all sorts of very nice things stored there.
There wasn’t very much gin. It looked as though we had drunk all of that.
Then I remembered Number Two Daughter’s very splendid birthday present, which had arrived this very morning and was still sitting on the desk in the office.
Happy birthday to us.
