I am not at work.
I am writing this as hastily as I can because I want to have a shower and go to bed early.
It will not be very early. It is already eleven o’clock. This is very early by our usual nocturnal standards. Quite often at eleven o’clock I am just eating my dinner and considering whether or not to pour another cup of tea and read about upsetting things in the Daily Telegraph, but we have got to get up for rural broadband reasons in the morning, and so we have got to get some sleep tonight.
We have had a night off. Not only have we had a night off, we have been at Elspeth’s house drinking wine. This was really quite splendid. Of course Elspeth’s daughter is at Gordonstoun as well, and so she and Oliver exchanged Enid Blyton stories of dorms and teachers and rascals for ages, most of which we had not heard, and to which we listened with great interest. Oliver has been obliged to do some compulsory gardening, which mostly seemed to involve throwing apples at one another. I am impressed with Gordonstoun despite this, it would never have occurred to me to enlist Oliver, or indeed any teenager, in a horticultural role, how very persuasive they must be.
Elspeth has very kindly donated a bike to Oliver. Of course he has got a bike already, but it is an old tired one that Mark found in a skip once. We have since discovered that there were some good reasons why somebody put it in a skip. Even with Mark’s careful restoration it is still rubbish. The brakes stick and it is heavy and the gears do not work very well any more.
This one is shiny and seems to work much better. Duffus House is at the top of a long slow hill, and Oliver does a lot of cycling, mostly with a sack of books on his back. The bike is important. Cycling uphill when your brakes are stuck on is not good fun.
In fact the bike was the last in a long list of acquisitions today.
It was the last day when we could empty things out of the about-to-be-demolished holiday village. We could have carried on tomorrow and Friday as well, but Mark has got to work then, so it had to be today.
We took both taxis down and loaded them to bursting point four times. This was harder than you might think. Taxis are not the right shape for carrying piles of kitchen units about, and one big carpet was so huge that we had to put it on the roof, and it still touched both bumpers. We do not know what we are going to do with this, carpet the house and garden and probably next door as well, perhaps.
It was too big to go in our house. It is in the conservatory, propped up on a ladder like an enormous hairy worm.
We took out the kitchens and the bathrooms and the carpets and the underlay. We have got quilts and cushions and fridges and freezers and dishwashers. When eventually we have rebuilt our house we will have a fitted kitchen in it, and a shiny bathroom in the loft, which is the last room without its own facilities for ablutions. We will put a bathroom in it, since we have got some spare ones now, and then one day we will rent it out to somebody who would like to do Air B and B in the Lake District.
We might be talking ‘distant future’ here.
As well as the unfitted kitchens we have also acquired all sorts of interesting things that we do not want, not least several rather splendid oval wooden dining tables and sets of chairs. These are ace, solid and polished and heavy. Obviously we have got no need whatsoever for four dining tables, we are not planning to open a restaurant, but they were so beautiful that we could not bear to see them chucked in the skip. If we can’t find anybody who would like them then we will cut them up and use the wood to build other things. If nothing else they could always be firewood, but we thought at least we would give them another chance.
If anybody wants a carpet or a new dining table do please let me know.
