Well, The Day has arrived.
Mark comes back tonight.
I think he might be some time before he gets home, probably not before midnight or so, because I am just about to go out to work and as far as I can tell he is still hanging about some airport on the Shetland Islands, speculating on the stock market on his mobile telephone and occasionally looking at his watch.
I am not exactly sorry for the delay. I have spent the day rushing around, as I always seem to have to do when he comes home, tidying up and cleaning grime out of corners.
Today I cleaned the horrid bit behind the bedding box in our bedroom.
This is in front of the window, and the wall behind gets horribly covered in black mould.
I have been ignoring this for ages, since last year’s spring clean, actually, and this spring has come and gone without me feeling the least inclination to occupy an afternoon squirting bleach at it.
I didn’t feel much inclination to do it today either, but I did. I didn’t even have the satisfaction of thinking smugly what a virtuous housewife I was, because quite obviously a virtuous housewife would never have let the wall get into that revolting state in the first place.
It is not exactly white now, but it is a much improved shade of grey, and will probably be all right for the next year or so, especially since the bedding box is in front of it and you can only see the bits of wall at the ends.
The bedroom needed a thorough clean because of the exciting installation of a brand new set of bedding.
This arrived ages and ages ago, but I have been virtuously saving it, and sleeping on the worn out sheets with the holes in, until Mark returned.
Today I stripped it all off, washed it, and turned the sheet into dishcloths.
Some bits of it were worn too thin even to be dishcloths, and will have to skip straight to being dog-sick cloths, or, now we have Guffy, Cat Poo cloths.
These do not get laundered, but go directly into the stove, being a more economical cleaning method than kitchen roll. We have been obliged to purchase kitchen roll, because of poor Guffy’s numerous accidents, but wasting money on especially thick quilted paper simply to throw it away, is a thorn in my parsimonious soul.
I know that is also what happens with loo roll, but I do not feel any impulse whatsoever to tear up used sheets for that purpose. There is a limit to economy.
The vet, incidentally, responded courteously to Google’s thoughtfully drafted email, and I can collect the drugs tomorrow. She explained that they won’t do any harm, even if they don’t actually work, and so it might be worth trying anything once.
Guffy is feeling a bit better, by the way, largely because of the steroid injection last week. I almost spent the next paragraph explaining to you about the ways in which it seems to have altered the consistency of her poo, but you will be pleased to hear that I suddenly remembered that some people might read this over breakfast, and desisted.
She still has chronic diarrhoea, albeit mildly better than last week.
Anyway, I put the new sheets on the bed, and it looks truly magnificent.
I had just written those words when my attention was distracted. Guffy appeared to sit on my knee, purring loudly and demanding that her face was rubbed. Any physical contact with Guffy is always mildly hazardous, because of the aforementioned Little Problem, which is not an eventuality one hopes will befall one’s trousers just before work, so I stopped writing to cover my knees with a cloth.
I was absent-mindedly reassuring Guffy of her continued wonderfulness and general adorability when I noticed something of a kerfuffle happening outside the living room window downstairs.
My office is on the landing, and gives me a rather splendid view of most of the rest of the house, and I can just see through the window, which looks out into the uninspiring vista of the underground hole beneath the front garden.
A crow had fallen into the hole, and was hopping about and peering through the window with some curiosity.
I watched for a few minutes, expecting that it would fly away, but it didn’t.
I shouted Oliver, and we went downstairs to look at it through the window.
It looked back, inquisitively.
We thought that some mischance had probably befallen it, and decided to mount a retrieval operation.
We needed next door’s ladders, which were on top of our shed. I do not know quite why they live there, but they do.
Oliver climbed down into the hole and collected the bird.
It was very young, and seemed to have some damage to one wing. The feathers were bashed and mis-shapen, and it could not fly.
We took it into the conservatory and examined it, and decided that the thing to do would be to keep it quietly for a little while and then have another look later, since I was already late for work.
Crows eat all sorts of rubbish, so I did not feel any compunction about feeding it anything unsuitable. As far as I can see they are quite happy to eat paper napkins from the restaurant across the road. We put it in a box, where it scoffed a dish full of cat food almost before we had scraped it out of the packet. It practically took bits of our fingers with it, so it might have been hopping about hungrily for a while.
It is upstairs, in Lucy’s room, with the window wide open and out of the way of any other interested domestic livestock.
With any luck it will have recovered by morning.
I will keep you posted.
