Considering construction

Mark has thrown the dress into the bin.

He is not very enthusiastic about diets and exercise. Actually I think he does not much like me when I am cross and miserable because of having to eat carrots.

He said that it was not worth all of the fuss and we would get another dress.

In consequence of this, I did not go to the gym last night. Mark went to Sainsbury’s for a bottle of wine and we stayed at home and drank it whilst watching A Game Of Thrones and eating home made rose flavoured fudge and chilli chocolate.

Oliver came downstairs and told us that there had been a question on his French exam paper which he did not understand. The question asked what the a French lady had in her hand. Oliver did not know what the word ‘le tricoloure’ implied, so he considered items that a French person might conceivably be holding, and in the end wrote: ‘a glass of wine’, which I thought was a jolly reasonable guess.

I got the dress out of the bin afterwards, because it is pretty, and Lucy might like it, but I am not going to try it on again. There is no point in making myself miserable.

It was not yet raining when we got up this morning, so we went out into the back yard. Mark is still continuing, slowly, with our building operations, and today we thought that we would plan the layout for the new conservatory.

This sounds very technically architectural, which it is in some ways, because of course we have got plumbing and electrical things to think of, but basically it involved deciding where we wanted to put the table.

This is important because almost all of the conservatory that is not table is going to be tropical rainforest and banana plantation.

We lugged the cement mixer out of the conservatory bit. I was pleased to discover that it did fit through the doorway. This has been giving me some secret anxiety. Then we got some boards and some bricks and the garden chairs and a tape measure, and arranged them so that we could imagine what things might look like. Then we sat in the chairs with a cup of tea and looked around ourselves to see if we liked it. After a little while we got up and rearranged everything and sat down somewhere else.

This does not sound like a very taxing way of occupying a morning, but I can tell you that it involved a very great deal of thoughtful pondering. We considered running gutter pipes into storage tanks, and whether we might install a fireplace, and where the light might come from, and other such weighty matters. It is jolly serious stuff.

You can see the final layout in the picture. We are not going to have one big flower bed any more. We are going to have a smaller flower bed at either side of the table so that we will be surrounded by garden. You can see the pallets and bits of board pretending to be flower beds.

Once we had settled that to our satisfaction, Mark went on to balance on the top of the ladder and screw things to the tops of the walls, and I borrowed the other ladder, to hang a string of fairy lights around the gate. This is because I am fed up of tripping over things on my way in from work in the dark.

I am sorry to say that I am still going to be tripping over things for some time yet to come, because it turns out that the string of lights we had are not the proper plug in sort, but are charged by the sunshine, from a little solar panel. I balanced this on the very top of the shed roof, where it will get every possible ray  but to no avail. It started raining within a minute or two, and has rained ever since, the lights have stayed resolutely off.

I am a bit discouraged by this, we are in the Lake District after all, and it is entirely conceivable that they won’t come on for weeks. I like the idea of green energy very much, but until we get electricity that comes on when you water it, it won’t take off much here.

Mark is getting on with the conservatory, in between outbreaks of rain diluting the cement. When we have got that I won’t care about the weather any more.

It can’t come soon enough.