Child free

I thought that I would celebrate becoming child-free with a spring clean.

Mark also thought that we should celebrate becoming child free, but he wasn’t at all thinking about spring cleaning and made me late for work. He has become very hairy lately. I thought it was perhaps old age, but he said it is the camping that did it, that it was so cold he has started to grow a new winter coat.

He is going to have to go back to work in a fortnight, so everything that he hasn’t done yet is beginning to get urgent. The camper, inexplicably, passed its MOT on everything except for a brake light being out, which astounded him completely, because it leaves a rusty trail behind it everywhere it goes, a bit like Hansel and the breadcrumbs. He said that he thinks he will try and mend some of the holes in it anyway, and he has been up at the farm all day, sawing up oak logs to bring back home to feed the stove, and glueing patches on to the poor camper with his welding machine. There are several trees which have come down at the farm, with any luck next winter’s heating won’t cost us anything at all again, except chainsaw fuel and backache.

I scrubbed and cleaned and hoovered in a very satisfactory way until all sticky evidence of Oliver’s presence had vanished and the house felt fresh and shiny. When I had finished I drifted happily round it admiring the nice tidy cleanness of it all for a while, and breathing in the splendidly reassuring smell of beeswax polish and lemon, and then went to work feeling pleased with myself.

I called back in at teatime to find Mark in the garden industriously sawing up and stacking some tree branches that he had loaded messily into the back of his taxi and brought back from the farm. The log pile around the stove was splendidly full, but there was sawdust all over the living room, and the dog was chewing a bit of bark into mossy splinters all over the clean carpet.

I remarked on this, of course, as you might expect, but neither of them seemed to be very sorry, and Mark just suggested that we took the dog for a walk and had a cup of coffee before I got the hoover out again. In the end after some discussion about housework that was what we did, and actually I was so pleased to see how nicely the log pile has grown that I didn’t really mind the mess very much. I like the sharp, acid smell of sawn oak, it has a man sort of echo to it, because it is a smell I associate with first with my father, and then my brother, and now my husband, all of whom are expert at adding sawdust to carpets.

The Library Garden is full of blossom now, everything has burst into faintly pink-and-gold tinged life, and the scent is just hanging in the air like a lace blanket over everything, it is glorious. We walked along telling each other how amazingly fortunate we are, to have such a nice life and lovely house in a very pleasant part of the world. What is more, we thought happily, the children are having a good time at school, we haven’t got any money worries at the moment, and the sun is shining.

We lit a candle to the gods of good fortune when we got back, in case they were looking, so that they would know how very much we appreciated everything.

After that we went to the WellBeing andFitness WholePerson Health Spa to go for a peaceful child-free swim, which was brilliant, it is one of the things that I miss doing when the children are home. Of course we can all go, but only at times when children are allowed, which is ghastly because of the children all over the place, and I have to be a shark instead of swimming lengths and then sitting in the sauna feeling smug. The children are fairly indifferent to going anyway, because they do a lot of swimming at school, Lucy’s school has got an indoor and an outdoor pool, and it is dull swimming with us and not crowds of their friends, so we don’t got very often in the holidays.

The sauna wasn’t working tonight because they are rebuilding the benches, so we had to go in the steam room instead. I was grumpy about this, because it never gets hot enough, but then one of the other night time regulars showed me how to put ice on the thermostat so that it thinks it needs to get hotter, and then we made it very hot and had a very satisfactory time indeed, steaming until it hurt and then diving into the ice shower and plastering ourselves with ice until we glowed Barbie-pink and plunged back into the pool for the last ten lengths.

We had to go back to work after that, but it is a lovely evening, and I am warm and clean and have got a good book, so I don’t mind in the least. It is nice to be able to be at work and not have to look after children.

I miss them both, though.