For a Saturday, it has been a peaceful sort of day.
We seem to have managed to do an awful lot.
It is jolly easy to organise a life that doesn’t have any children in it. I have only cooked the things that we want to eat, and only washed up dishes that we have used, and only washed clothes that we have worn. Also the house does not seem to be getting dirty nearly as quickly.
It is very quiet.
Mark has been building his shed at the end of the garden. He is putting a roof on it. You can see in the picture what it looks like at the moment.
The picture is not very good because of my stripy apron being reflected in the window. It took me ages to work out what it was. Sorry.
I helped him a bit, at some wobbly moments. It has got a big slope on it in order to facilitate a solar panel. Apart from being very handy when it comes to paying the electricity bills, I think that it might turn out to be useful if the country has a relapse to the nineteen seventies and everybody goes on strike.
Whilst Mark was teetering about on his ladders I went upstairs to rediscover the loft.
I had got some hunting to do. I have had an email from Oliver’s school telling me that he needs a costume for Book Week.
This is supposed to be a character from a book with a sea-related theme.
This Book Week thing is a very irritating modern development.
I read far more books as a child than any of my children ever did, and nobody had invented Book Week or any such other drivel then. On the whole, the children who liked books read them, and the children who didn’t, didn’t bother.
Nobody ever asked me to dress up as something ridiculous out of a book, and I don’t recall that I would have liked it if they had, unless perhaps it had been Jo from Little Women.
Certainly it does not seem to make anybody more interested in reading. Oliver has dressed up as Heathcliff and a Hogwarts student and other tiresome disguises, and he still never reads anything except The Beano and stories about zombies.
We have decided that his maritime costume can be a pirate, since I don’t fancy trying to manufacture a shark or a lobster. It can be a generic pirate since I can’t be bothered with a wooden leg, he will have to be one of Long John Silver’s crew. If the theme turns out to be Under The Sea, rather than just the sea in general, which it might, he will just have to be a drowned pirate. We have probably got a pirate costume in the loft somewhere, left over from my own days of being a pirate.
Oliver’s whole class is being seafarers. They are going to spend the night sleeping next to the shark tank in an aquarium.
Schools do some peculiar things these days.
It sounds very thrilling but not especially literary.
I have been worrying about the pirate costume. Today I went to start investigating the loft.
Apart from the pirate costume, I remembered that all of our winter clothes are stored up there, and it occurred to me that they would be likely to come in handy in the very near future.
They were all buried underneath the eaves.
It was not cheering to look at them. Things were a lot more worn than I remembered. Mark’s heavy winter shirts turned out to be frayed at the collars and the cuffs, which does not matter for working, but I will not be around all winter to make sure that he does not accidentally wear them for going to school.
I brought some of the better ones down. There were not many.
I left the thermal underwear there. I hope it will be a few more weeks before we need it.
I did not find the pirate costume before it was time to get ready for work. It was too deeply buried. Hunting for things in the loft is a bit like archaeology, the things at the bottom being from the most distant past. It is some time since anybody has been a pirate, apart from in the normal way of things at work, which is fairly close to piracy at times.
I shall have to have another go tomorrow.
