Somehow I do not have very many stories to tell you tonight.
The day has been terribly busy, the sort that leaves you with sore feet and an inclination to sit down, but not especially interesting. Tidying up and sweeping out the boot cupboard takes gritty ages, and involves much reorganisation and consideration, but it is not the stuff of which literary thunderbolts are formed.
I have been putting my house in order after my prolonged absence.
This has not been a small task.
It is not so much that my family are messy. On the whole they are not too bad at putting things away, or at least putting them where I can’t see them any more, which is just as good. At any rate, it is just as good at the moment. It will probably make me very cross when they all buzz off back to school and work and I go to clean their bedrooms and discover rubbish mouldering horribly in every crevice.
It is more that they have eaten absolutely every single thing in the house, used all of the towels, and worn three hundred pairs of shoes, all of which were in a pile by the back door.
I tidied those up. Number Two Daughter was prevailed upon to take the surplus across the road to the shoe bank. Oliver’s feet have become yet larger during the holidays, and last term’s shoes no longer have any sort of useful function. You can’t even really make them into pretty flower pots or novelty pen holders in the way of crafty pages on the Internet, not least because they smell awful.
I have wondered about this sort of activity on and off, from the point of view of running a frugal domestic economy, also because of showing off what a virtuous housewife I am, but there are no inspiring answers, no matter how much I look at Google. There is nothing lovely to be done with them. Used training shoes, alas, are merely clutter.
Mark buzzed off first thing in the morning to install rural broadband somewhere around Lancaster, and I set to replenishing the poor bare fridge. I cooked a chicken and some sausages. I baked some cherry shortbread and some caramel chocolate shortbread, and in the end I fried some rice with bacon and sweetcorn for everybody’s dinner.
This repopulated the fridge considerably, which was a small relief, I did not have to stand for ages in front of the open door this evening, wondering what on earth I might give them all to eat. In between times I washed everything, but everything. This took four loads even in our massive washing machine, and I pegged it all in relays, in the wreckage of the garden, to dry.
I think the Weather Gods must have gone for their annual holiday, or be away on a course, or something, because to my surprise, despite ominous grey skies all day, not a drop of rain touched any of it.
The last lot was flapping nicely when Elspeth rang the front doorbell.
This was splendid. It would have been an excuse to sit down and shirk for a bit if I had finished, but I hadn’t, so I had to keep bobbing up and down whilst we talked, stirring rice and spreading chocolate and slicing fruit to take to work.
All the same, it was nice to have a visitor. Housework is dull by yourself. It is fairly dull even if you have got some company, but you don’t notice that if you are busy talking.
Elspeth had come to tell me about her weekend holiday at a thing called Sol Fest, which is a gathering of hippies who do not want to do anything troublesome, and to find out about Oliver’s adventures in Scotland.
It was lovely to have company, and I would have liked to open a bottle of wine and settle down for the night, but I had got to go to work. By the time the last of the towels had dried we had still not managed to share enough stories and opinions, we will have to try and get together again soon.
And then it was time to drive a taxi.
The picture is Oliver exploring Scotland. He is in his dressing gown, because you do not need to get dressed in the morning if you are going somewhere in the camper van.
