Once again it is the middle of the night and I am hastily batting out a few words before I go to bed.
I would have started sooner but somebody on the mighty Internet has started a group where people write to one another, just little woffly things, generally with some philosophical tune to them, and it has captivated me.
It is rather splendid to be encouraged to air all of one’s opinions in an environment where people are too polite to be rude about them, and so I have been pontificating to my heart’s content. I came to write to you tonight only to find my computer bursting with remarks and abstract ideas demanding a thoughtful and considered response, so obviously I was instantly distracted into saying Ah Yes But and disappearing up my own philosophical behind.
I could have gone on for ages but really I ought to be in bed.
I am not in a desperate hurry because I am by myself, and not limited to the time it takes Mark to get out of the shower.
Mark has buzzed off to Aberdeen to do his plating assessment. I jolly well hope it goes all right, he is jolly good at what he does but you can fail this stuff for not remembering which of your boots you were supposed to put on first and not making a note about it on the Hot Works Permit so that the ICO can tell the SRM and they can do an assessment. Oil rigs are complicated places.
I have not minded his absence in the least. Oliver is away as well, he and Emily buzzed off to Bath the other day and are lurking down there until they come back for Lucy’s wedding which is now looming terrifyingly large on my horizon.
Their collective absence has meant that my time is my own, and I do not have to be distracted with feeding them and clearing up their clutter. I can’t even go to work, because Mark has taken our only reliably working taxi to Aberdeen, for obvious reasons, and so I have been getting on quietly with my own wedding preparations. These, as you know, have involved cleaning.
We have hired a carpet cleaning machine.
Mark collected it this morning before he left. It didn’t have any instructions, so I had to ask Chat GPT, which droned on and on about unplugging it before I started sloshing water all over it, not mixing different sorts of soap and testing it out on an inconspicuous bit first, all of which I ignored, but between us we managed it, and it is working rather splendidly.
It is a colossal machine, as big as the coffee table with a bucket at one end and a hose at the other. You fill the bucket with hot soapy water, and wag the hose about, and it squirts it out all over your carpet and then slurps it back up again. This is rather fun to do if you ignore the backache and the bits where your trousers got in the way.
Rather alarmingly, the stuff that is coming out of the carpet is the most disgusting colour. I mean really revolting, brown and greasy with a black scum on the top. It is so unspeakably awful that I don’t even want to pour it down the sink.
I have banned all animals from the living room for the rest of their lives. If we are going to have a grubby carpet then it can just be my grub.
The living room carpet is now a wonderful bright green once again, and I keep looking at it and feeling happy with my world. I have not quite finished it yet. It is all done except for the bit underneath the dresser, but moving the dresser is going to involve rather more effort than I was quite prepared to do in the middle of the night, so that bit can wait until tomorrow.
I am going to do all of the carpets and see if they will all become lovely again. Especially the one in my office, which never truly recovered from the awful mess that happened when Roger Poopy was born and his mother was terribly unwell afterwards.
Roger Poopy is ten now, so I suppose I might have left it a bit late for that. .
I am going to have a go anyway.
