I am on the taxi rank and I am feeling surprisingly contented.
Indeed, I would say that I am entirely happy with my world.
It has been a very splendid sort of day.
It started impossibly early, because Mark had an appointment to go and have his blood pressure checked at the GP surgery.
The nurse did it, not the doctor, although I do not think the results can have been improved by a simultaneous discussion of the Government’s policies in relation to the oil industry.
If he can still have relatively normal blood pressure after that then he is doing very well indeed.
I took the dogs out whilst he was thus occupied, and when I came back, Mark very benevolently suggested that he come and help me reorganise the loft.
This was really kind of him because there are lots of other things that he wants to do before he goes away again next week.
We had lots of day left, because of the early start, and I was very pleased indeed. As I am sure you recollect from yesterday’s prolonged grumble, the attic had begun to resemble the sort of foreign recycling centre where desperate children root through mounds of plastic bottles hunting for anything that they might be able to dig out and sell to somebody else with almost no cash.
We started off behind the chest of drawers, where I had shoved a collection of junk that I did not think we might use very much.
We dragged it all out and then crawled behind it with the hoover. There had been something of a moth infestation at one point, and most of the carpet came away with the dust. Most of the moths seemed to have departed, probably due to the moth-eating wasps we had imported from the sort of online retailer that promises both greenly blissful benevolence to the natural world and also hideous massacre of all undesirable nuisances.
Mark suggested that we threw our ice skates away but I could not quite bring myself to such a step into our declining years, and so we kept them, although if ever we do decide to go ice skating again I suspect it will be such a complete faff to dig everything out from behind the drawers that we will just hire skates.
Note to the children. When we die all of the photographs from your early years are also buried there. I suggest you chuck them out. Quite clearly the photographers were without any kind of artistic skill, and we all look either ridiculous, mad or blurry, and mostly a combination of the lot. Remembering your childhoods without visual aids might be a better idea.
After the chest of drawers we moved under the bed, where Oliver’s collection of guns and all things PlayStation were stored, and then the corner under the eaves.
We hauled everything out and then put almost all of it back, tidily, and without any moth eggs.
Then we spent half an hour winding fabrics on to long sticks so that they would sit tidily on the bed instead of being in crumpled, half-folded, wrinkly heaps. It is very difficult to fold twenty metres of cloth neatly when you are by yourself, and I have been trying, in a frustrated sort of way, to keep them in orderly piles. Not only has this not worked, it has not helped keep the attic tidy, and basically it has been like being a waitress at an enormous moth picnic.
By the time we had finished the attic seemed to have become larger. It feels lovely to have everything so organised, as if I was the sort of person who did proper sewing instead of just the sticking pins in my fingers and swearing sort.
I looked around it happily.
I can start on the ironing tomorrow.
I am actually looking forward to it.
