Still no kittens.
Guffy is buckling at the knees.
I am reassuring her that everything will happen in the fullness of time but I am not even convincing myself. She is the roundest cat I have ever seen, and can hardly walk any more, let alone leap up to the sofa with her usual graceful bound to curl up amongst the cushions. She is sleeping on the floor underneath because it is just easier.
Guffy’s lack of action somehow feels entirely symptomatic of our lives at the moment. Nothing seems to be happening to us, and it is not happening very frustratingly.
The cat has not had kittens, nobody is buying our house and my car still does not go. Worst of all, nobody seems to be in need of anybody to work on oil rigs in the North Sea, and Mark’s telephone is not ringing.
This last is probably not really the worst of all, but perhaps rather a good thing, , given that my car is in a hundred oily pieces and its engine is dangling from a crane in the back yard. This would not be a perfect moment for Mark to disappear on a helicopter for three weeks.
All the same it is troubling. He has called the companies he works for, but they are all telling us the same thing, which is that there is no work anywhere for anybody and they are all going to go broke as well if things do not perk up soon.
I am not really worried, because Mark is good at his job, and sooner or later somebody will telephone in a terrible panic, begging him to rush off to Aberdeen with his helmet and boots under his arm, and jump on a helicopter straight away.
The thing is that it needs to be very soon. If we have to wait very much longer before he sets off, then he will not be able to go at all, because three weeks on an oil rig would mean that he would not be back in time for Lucy’s wedding.
Obviously he couldn’t miss that, even if we were going to starve to death, which we are not.
Hence we are resigning ourselves to his being at home for a little while.
I am a bit pleased about this even if we will be a bit short of cash, because it will mean that when he has eventually mended my car, we will be able to get on with the camper van, which is still sitting forlornly in the shed.
All the same, life does feel as though something has got a bit stuck somewhere. It is not flowing merrily along at an encouraging pace.
We are plodding along, doing tedious maintenance tasks, and waiting for the winds of change to whip us up into a whirl of activity.
Today’s maintenance tasks were mostly tidying up, because there is a chap coming to view the house tomorrow. We will have to get up and buzz off, because we are not allowed to be in the house when the estate agent is trying to sell it. I do not know why this is. The estate agent said that it was because customers find it embarrassing when the owner is there but I do not think this is true. We have just visited a French house where the owner was there, and we sat down and had a very contented cup of tea and exchanged stories. The owner suggested that we stayed there the night and drank wine instead of setting off back on the journey back to England, and we declined, but it might have been fun.
I suspect the real reason is so that you can’t hear what the estate agent is saying. You are paying them a great deal of cash for selling your house and they do not wish to be caught out talking twaddle, and really, the estate agent does not have the first idea about our house at all. I would be quite surprised if they even managed to find their way up to the attic, never mind were able to explain the heating interplay of stove, windmill, solar tubes and solar panels.
Mark will be fixing the car in the alley, and will be able to answer any difficult questions.
I hope the chap is interested in boilers.
