It is raining.
Having looked forward to this event through weeks of mildly worrying garden drought, today I was not, in the end, pleased.
This was because Roger Poopy, who is allowed on our bed in the mornings whilst we have coffee, as long as he lies on an ancient towel spread there for the purpose, somehow missed the towel and had a small, but nevertheless rather noticeable leak.
I can hardly find the words to tell you how horrified I was. Very, very, with knobs on.
Of course the whole lot had to come off. There was no leak on the sheet or the pillowcases, but I am sure you will understand that there was always the fear that they might have been contaminated by association. These days we all know that anything that even passes within two metres of a germ is in mortal danger, even if the germ is sauntering along absent-mindedly on the other side of the road and cleverly disguised behind a mask and some rubber gloves.
We took the sheets and pillowcases off as well.
Anyway, I like having clean sheets.
This meant that our sheets have had a jackpot week when it comes to cleanliness. There was the bird poo misfortune the other day, and then the dog leak misfortune this morning. The most socially virtuous champion of the NHS could have no cause for alarm when it comes to the immaculate safety and pristine smugness of our sheets. They have been boiled until they have almost dissolved.
The thing was that the rain meant there was nowhere to dry them.
I pegged them outside anyway, because it was only raining a bit.
A little while later Mark noticed that it was belting rain down with dismal grey determination, so he brought them in and draped them wetly all over the house.
They are not quite dry yet. We might have to get the hairdryer out before bedtime.
I have had the hairdryer out anyway today, because I have been using it to heat the gold strips to stick them thoroughly to the walls in the circus tent. This is almost, although not quite, finished now. We have got to paint the door and Mark is going to put a picture frame around the mirror.
He was going to do this today, except when we dug out the length of picture frame, we discovered that we did not have quite as much as we thought we had, and it was a foot too short.
This was massively frustrating, and we considered all the ways we could think of of making it longer, but of course picture frame does not stretch and in the end I was reduced to telephoning the picture frame sellers and wondering if they had some more.
“Oh, yes,” said the chap on the phone cheerfully, once he had established that I was quite sure which sort of frame I wanted. “We’ve got plenty of that, it’s the fat gold one for people with no taste.”
They could not sell me any, as it happened, because their internet has been on fire and their bank payment system doesn’t work, so it will have to wait for a bit longer.
It will be lovely when it is done though, imagine a circus tent with a fat gold-framed mirror.
LATER NOTE:
We are about to go to bed.
After all of that effort we are still going to get in between grubby sheets.
There is a postscript to the sheet-washing story.
When Mark brought them in he hung them on the drying rack over the top of the stove.
Of course we have not used this for weeks and weeks. The weather has been warm, and bright, and full of skylarks and bluebells, and all the washing has flapped itself sunnily dry in the garden.
In the meantime, the drying rack has been sitting emptily and ignored in the living room.
We have been doing all sorts of domestic repair projects, one of which, you might recall, was to demolish a bricked-up doorway into the living room. One amongst many, of course.
It did not occur to Mark that the drying rack might have become dusty.
I can hardly blame him for this because it did not occur to me either.
We have got smudgy grey and white stripy sheets.
I am not going to think about clean linen any more.
It is for smaller minds, and I am going to rise above such domestic pettinesses.
