We are back on the taxi rank.
I do not mind this at all. It has been wonderful to have had such a lot of rest. We have eaten dinners in our own house instead of picnics, and gone to bed exactly when we have felt like it. This has been splendid.
The dinners were not especially splendid because they were things we had been saving in the freezer and had to chuck in the microwave at the last minute. This was lovely because it is nice to have a microwave but things like carrots taste better when eaten at the time of cooking, and not two years later. All the same it is useful to have plenty of space in the freezer and next week I shall do some more cooking and fill it up again.
Mark came home from work full of excitement. He and Ted have discovered some interesting batteries in a scrapyard that they can use for all manner of things. I do not know what the things are.
Mark says that he will put a windmill in our back yard and use it to charge the batteries and then we will have lots of electricity at almost no cost whatsoever. He has already got a windmill hidden in bits in his shed. He thinks that I do not know about this.
I do not know if you have ever seen our back yard but there is barely room to hang the washing out.
When I was a child there was a programme on the television called Camberwick Green, which featured a chap with a windmill. He was called Windy Miller, and the sails of the windmill swept past his door. He had to walk out between them as they turned, in order to wave at the watching children and to be greeted by Brian Cant, who narrated the story. This short journey filled me with agonies of anxiety as a child. Since it was the nineteen sixties and realistic television had not been invented, Windy Miller was never chopped to pieces by the passing windmill blades, but I worried about them all the same.
I explained this to Mark, to account for my lack of enthusiasm about having a windmill in our back garden.
Mark told me how Windy Miller’s windmill might have worked, along with details about cogs and axles, but failed to address the central points of my argument, which were firstly that I did not want to be chopped to pieces, and secondly that he has not yet finished his solar water heater.
I was impressed by this speech, he could have been on Question Time. It was magnificently informative whilst telling me nothing that I wished to hear and whilst also maintaining a discreet silence on topics that he thought might get him into trouble. He has misjudged his vocation.
The solar heater is currently in the conservatory, waiting until we can afford some more bits to finish it off.
The batteries appear to be in the garden already. It was dark when I went out to work, so I could not see, but I stubbed my toe on something unfamiliar and so suspect that they have arrived.
He can transform our house to run on wind power. I expect he will do this in between building his solar panel, finishing the conservatory, installing my fitted kitchen, keeping us in firewood and doing two full time jobs.
I suspect that the experience of stubbing my toe on the batteries might soon become very familiar indeed.
Have a picture of a morning walk.
