You will be pleased to hear that we are no longer having an argument.
This is because Mark has tidied up the quite remarkable mess in the garden and agreed to reconsider his domestic priorities.
I expect you will think that this is jolly well the way things should be. Things have improved, and I have hardly had to throw anything.
The difficulty with the mess was not merely an aesthetic one, although I might have mentioned this element of it in passing. The thing is that we come home from work every night in the dark. Surprise pickaxes left on the path are not a brilliant discovery when you are wearing flip flops.
There has also been an issue with laundry. It is wearisome to come to a row of Mrs. Tiggywinkle-like neatly pegged sheets, only to discover that they have flapped against some horrible filthy black thing left in the yard by a messy person, and that your snowy linens look like something that might be worn by Cruella deVil.
I am not sure that Mark was exactly pleased to have my concerns highlighted to him, but eventually he remembered that I am generally in the right and capitulated. He usually does in the end.
Today he did not build a heating machine for sunny days. Today he tidied up the yard and swept the chimney.
I was very pleased indeed about the chimney. Regular readers might recall that we have had some troubling encounters with the fire brigade in the past, and these days I do not like to light the fire for the winter until the chimney has been thoroughly swept. Winter is almost upon us here in the north, and the need for an actual heating system, the sort that works when the sun is not shining, has been growing ever more pressing.
It is perhaps as well that he did, because it was very sooty indeed. Mark cleaned the stove out as well, and in the end he emptied a couple of buckets of soot into the new flowerbed. I will mix this in with the compost eventually, to deter slugs, not that I suppose it will. It is a terrible shame that slugs are not more palatable really, my garden would be like the Savoy Grill if only I was a hedgehog.
Once Mark had cleaned the chimney he tidied up the conservatory and levelled the floor. This was not something that I had been shouting about, but he had concluded that it was a sensible move before bringing some massive ladders home and wagging about at the top of them, somewhere around the third floor.
I did not assist with all of this activity. Instead I stayed in the kitchen and baked things. He is going to install some rural broadband next week, and he will need some carbohydrates to keep him going.
The fridge was satisfyingly full when I had finished. There was bread and cake and biscuits and chocolate and fudge. I peeled back the skin of a chicken and stuffed it full of chopped bacon and garlic. I stuck this winning combination in a dish with a chunk of gammon and shoved it in the oven to roast slowly, it will do his sandwiches all week.
The picture is an illustration of the North/South divide. It is Number One Daughter’s feet and my feet, taken about an hour apart. Lucy is visiting Number One Daughter at the moment, they are cooking and talking about daughterly things. I do not know what these are and probably would not understand them if I did. Young people think about the world very differently.
It is shocking to see the difference between them and us. Poor things, you would think they would be able to afford shoes.
In case you have missed it, Oliver added another post yesterday. It made me laugh a lot.
