I really ought to investigate our bookshelves a bit more thoroughly.
I had run out of reading matter today.
Last night I finished up outside the nightclub with a weighty tome about the different ways in which food has been adulterated throughout the ages. This was interesting but hardly the stuff to keep you alert and on the edge of your seat at three o’ clock in the morning. In fact I think that ‘soporific’ might actually be quite a good description, rather like some of the substances fed to children in the eighteen hundreds, and which, regrettably, have since gone out of fashion.
This evening I thought perhaps I might find some alternative reading matter. It should be something sufficiently alarming to encourage wakefulness, but more interesting than, say, party political manifestos, which would otherwise fit the bill rather nicely.
I scanned my shelves fruitlessly for ages. This is a bit depressing, because I have got hundreds and hundreds of books. There is the difficulty that these days, anything with small print is almost impossible to read in the January gloom of the taxi. Apart from that I have read them all anyway. Some of them I have read so often that I can recite bits.
In the end I went upstairs to have a hunt through the alternative book storage, by which I mean Lucy’s shelves and also the piles and piles of books dumped in the loft. When we are rich I am going to buy a Kindle and thus free up yards and yards of dustily occupied storage space
To my happiness I discovered a couple of books of my own that I had not read. I had bought them and saved them for an emergency, and then tidied up and forgotten about them. As well as these there was a book for which I had been searching on the shelves of Windermere Library for ages, after it was recommended to me by my friend the librarian. In addition to these there was a copy of a book that I had since bought again, this time for Oliver, and several books of Lucy’s that I had not read but liked the look of.
I was very pleased indeed about this, and am now sitting comfortably on the taxi rank reading a book about the validity of medical studies, which will do until about eleven. After that I am likely to get sleepy, and there is a rip-roaring tale about witchcraft and murder which will probably make me too frightened to empty the dogs by myself when we have finished.
It is wonderful to have a job which mostly involves sitting about reading things. I have, as you know, often considered career diversification, not that anybody is ever likely to employ me. In reality, though, it is hard to improve on a job where I can come and go exactly as I please, and at which I do as close to nothing as it is possible to do, especially at this time of year. The worst that it gets is driving around the Lake District.
We have had a quiet day at home today as well. Yesterday was long, and fairly fully occupied, and so today we got up very late indeed. This meant that there was not a great deal of day in between getting up and going to work, so we faffed about the house, gently.
I went to Sainsbury’s, failing to notice until it was too late that I was wearing mismatched flip-flops, These were constructed by Mark from several odd flip-flops left over from the days when Roger Poopy used to eat them.
I am never going to become a fashion icon.
Mark carried on with kitchen construction.
He is doing a good job, as you can see from the picture, except that he has made the step up to it lower than I had wanted.
I did not discover this until just before it was time to go to work.,
I had asked for it to be raised up by at least six inches. When we looked at it this evening it was only four and a half, because that was the size of the timber that he had got out of the builders’ yard skip.
This caused me some consternation.
We discussed it at length, because it will be quite difficult to make it all higher at this stage. All of the cupboards will need to be lifted up a bit.
He said that size is not everything.
I disagreed.
I have told him that it is a challenge, and this is the time when we will find out how much he loves me.
I will let you know.
Also, just so you know, I have added some photographs to Oliver’s last posts, about the school dinner. They were on the school website so I have pinched them.
