Still no kittens, poor Guffy.
She is hiding underneath Mark’s armchair in the living room, and will come out to lie exhaustedly on my knee, but that is about it.
It looks as if we are going to have a mess on the carpet if she doesn’t change her mind soon.
I am not very excited about the kittens’ arrival. The local rogue whom I suspect of having fathered them is so ugly that I do not imagine they are going to be the sort of kittens that manage to make brief careers for themselves by being photographed to be featured on the front of chocolate boxes or on people’s Facebook pages.
They are going to be dull, fat, black and white creatures.
I am sure Guffy will think they are lovely, which I suppose is the most important thing.
In the meantime it has been an uneventful day. It was raining this morning, but I hung the washing out anyway, because this is not the South of France, it is Cumbria, and there was the sort of brisk wind that made me feel that it might dry off a bit anyway
Also the house has been festooned with steaming laundry since our return, and I am fed up of pushing my way through it, like somebody exploring a tropical rain forest although without the anxieties about spiders and snakes.
I hung it all out in the yard and promptly forgot about it. Mark brought it in out of the rain later on when he came back from the shed.
He has been busy in the shed, rigging up lighting so that we can get on with the camper van, which is our next project. It is too wet to bring it outside, since you might recall that there are still holes in the roof, and working in the shed is going to be dark.
I am very much looking forward to getting back to it. It has been far too long.
It might be delayed for a few days anyway, because he has got to do some repairs to my car. It is billowing out white smoke as if it were choosing a new Pope, and not only Mark, but several other taxi drivers, have been explaining to me what is the matter with it.
It needs some new bits glueing into its engine. I do not know what they are, only that they will arrive in the post this week some time. After that their installation is going to be a very irritating nuisance involving removing the sump and other things before Mark can manage to get his hands to the place where they are going to finish up.
I have nodded politely but since it is not my problem I have not paid any attention to the detail. I am engaged in finishing the ironing and clearing up all of the post-holiday clutter, after which I have got to ready the house for somebody to come to view it this weekend.
I am not very excited about that either. He is viewing half a dozen houses, and I think it is unlikely that ours will be the one that he wants, especially because he wants to turn it into a holiday house.
Our house will take an awful lot of messing about before it gets to that state of glorious perfection. It would need a new gas boiler for a start, because people on their holidays will not be able to work out how to keep a house warm with a wood burner. They will set the chimney on fire and probably finish up still being cold anyway.
It is not a house for being on your holidays. It is a house for setting bread to rise and hanging washing above the fire and drying muddy boots.
It is quite likely to be a house full of unpleasant cat-afterbirth stains by the time I get home from work.
It might not sell very quickly at this rate.
