I did not need to go to Kendal to collect Number Two Daughter last night. As we arrived home she bounced drunkenly around the corner of the alley, and then fell into the ditch that Mark has dug in the back garden for the footings for the conservatory.
She was stuck on her back then, like a beetle, and we had to pull her out.
She had had a lovely night, and had been celebrating their win with the other joyous rugby girls. They had celebrated quite comprehensively, with predictable consequences.
She had some toast and grape jam and staggered up the stairs to bed.
She was not very well this morning.
She emerged briefly for coffee, and to show us her rugby bruises, which were colourful and impressive, and to groan a bit. After that she sloped off back to bed, where she stayed until it was almost time to go to work.
I felt very sympathetic. Hangovers are ghastly things.
Maybe having things to celebrate is not all that it is cracked up to be.
We did not stay in bed, pleasant as that might have been. Over coffee, we planned the day’s activities.
We thought that we would reorganise the garden and give ourselves some space to build things.
Mark said that the next thing that needed to be built was the new yard, so that we were not sliding around in mud whilst we did everything else.
Since we dug up the lawn, there has been a lot of mud.
We needed to empty everything out of Mark’s new shed.
We will have to take the current sheds down, so we could not put anything else into them.
After some discussion we reluctantly decided to move the log pile into the house and put the glass for the conservatory in its place. This means that we can dig down and find the drains in the place where the glass had been.
I reached the gloomy conclusion that this was the best plan that we could possibly invent.
I moved the logs into the house.
They are in a huge stack on top of an old carpet next to the sofa where the children’s luggage has been all summer.
They make an unusual living room ornament, and they seem to have a number of slugs and spiders living amongst them, but at least they will be dry, and handy for when we light the fire.
After that we had a space in the garden. We moved everything round, which helped, until finally there was nothing left to be tripped over.
Once the muddy bit was clear we had to dig the soil out of it, because there had to be a shallow hole in which we could lay the bricks.
We wondered what to do with the soil. Mark has been transporting spare soil into the Library Gardens, where they have had several holes, left over from drainage misadventures and uprooted trees. He has filled them in and turfed over the top of them so that the ground is smooth and even again.
We filled the wheelbarrow and Mark took it to the Library Gardens whilst I carried on digging out the old lawn.
He returned with the lady gardener from the Library Gardens, who had been curious about what he was doing.
Mark had been explaining to some ladies in the Library Gardens that he was stealing the hole. He was bringing the hole back to our house and changing its shape so that nobody would ever recognise it as the one that has been sitting, unwanted, in the Library Gardens for so long.
It was obvious who had stolen the hole because of the trail of muddy footprints between our house and the Library Gardens. You would not need to have been Sherlock Holmes to work it out.
The lady gardener said that he was getting soaked and needed a coat, and laughed, and left us to it. She did not mind at all about the stolen holes.
It was late by the time we had finished, and we were filthy.
We would have liked a sleep, but we had got to go to work.
We showered first, and now we are on the taxi rank.
I would still like a sleep.
It has been a busy day.
