We have a new lodger.
She is staying in the loft for a few weeks until she has resolved some temporarily difficult circumstances. This is not as inconvenient as it sounds since so far she has been phantom-quiet, and only emerged occasionally to take the dogs for a long walk and to pop into the village.
She has offered to hoover. I think this is a brilliant idea. Also the dogs like being around somebody who does not bellow at them every time they are nit-wits. They came back from their walk looking so pleased with themselves that it was perfectly clear they had been rascals. The new lodger said they had had a lovely time, which proved it.
In any case at the moment an extra person in the house doesn’t make very much difference, because Lucy is still away, protecting everybody at a festival called Beat Herder, and there is just us and Oliver.
Oliver has announced himself to be suffering from post traumatic stress disorder in the wake of the exams and the camping, and has retreated to his bedroom, where he has spent the last couple of days attired in his dressing gown and eating yoghurt and pizza and blowing up zombies. It sounds as though all of his friends are in there as well, I can hear Son Of Oligarch as clearly as anything, but whenever I go upstairs Oliver is still all by himself. The modern world is a splendid one.
Something nice happened this evening.
I was going out to work and gave Oliver a hug goodbye, and he told me how nice I smell.
Helpfully, I squirted some of my nice smelling hand cream on his hands so that he could smell nice himself as well. He sniffed it doubtfully.
“Yes, that’s nice,” he said, “but it isn’t the nice smell I meant. The nice smell is just you.”
I was very pleased. I often feel as though I smell of horrible stale-beer-and-cigarettes taxi customers, and it was cheering to think that I don’t.
I needed cheering. I have been feeling gloomy today.
This was because Mark went off out into the sunshine to mess about at the farm, leaving me in the horrible dark kitchen, cooking things for everybody’s dinner and making mayonnaise.
It isn’t really horrible. I was just feeling grumpy. In fact the kitchen is as light as an underground kitchen possibly can be, but it is still not like being outdoors in the sunshine, which was where I wanted to be.
When Mark came back he suggested that we had a rethink about the conservatory and put the kitchen in it instead of a banana plantation, which was a new idea so surprising that I was not sure what I thought about it. It is all very well putting the kitchen where the banana plantation should be, but that leaves me without anywhere to put the banana plantation, since it can’t very well go in the kitchen. I can’t even get parsley to grow in a pot on the underground windowsill in there.
He has measured it up and thinks that it would be possible if I wanted to do it, but now I am just in a quandary and can no longer think straight about it. I have flapped and wondered and flapped a bit more. I have drawn pictures of the conservatory and tried to imagine making mayonnaise in there, but I can’t.
I think I am probably traumatised and need to put my dressing gown on and eat pizza.
This is not a good look for the taxi rank.
I will have to find another cure.
Have a cheering picture of the Library Gardens. I don’t know what these are but they smell wonderful.
