I have blown the Chancellor’s very generous subsidy on repaying our mortgage arrears.
This was a very splendid thing to have done. We will not be evicted for weeks and weeks now.
There was even some change left over, and I blew that as well. I bought all sorts of things that I have been longing to buy for ages, but have refrained due to motives of parsimony. Today I splashed out recklessly, and bought wonderful things like hand cream and hair conditioner and shaving cream.
I do not use shaving cream. This was for Mark.
I am feeling happy in my inner soul. I do not any longer need to keep looking anxiously at the scrapings at the bottom of the hand cream tub, wondering if they will last long enough to keep my hands feeling soft and lovely the way they would if I was in an advertisement. It is ages since I have seen any advertisements but I bet there would not be any hands like mine in them, unless they were perhaps advertising industrial-strength soap. I got rid of most of the soot but there is still a bit left under the nails, and I have added a scraping or two of paint. Also if I were to visit a fortune teller I would be there for ages, because my palms have got hundreds and hundreds of creases these days.
In a very few days none of this will matter. I will be able to lavish them with moringa-scented loveliness and my world will be perfect.
I expect Mark feels like that about the shaving cream.
I have occupied this afternoon with sewing.
One of the delightful things about staying in hotels is the lovely clean towels that arrive in your bathroom every day. I know you can put them in the bath and save the planet and the hotel’s laundry expenses, but if I am on holiday I like clean towels, and so I don’t do that. You can call me wicked if you like.
I am not on holiday at the moment but I still like clean towels.
In our bathroom we have a towel ring from which I hang a towel. It is a rubbish towel ring, because somehow the towels never dry out in between uses. They stay damp and unappealing. Also when Mark has used them they get grubby fingerprints on them as well.
The towels are too big to wash every day. They would take up half of the washing machine. Hence I leave them there and just try and find a dry bit to wipe my hands on when I have washed them. This goes on for about three or four days until I become revolted with myself or until Mark leaves some very unappealing smears. Then I chuck the towel in the washing machine and get a new one.
Today I thought that if the towels were smaller perhaps I would not have this problem. I could change them every singe day and still have room in the washing machine for our clothes.
In fact things have been invented for a ready-made solution to this difficulty. They are called ‘hand towels’, and are just like bath towels, only smaller.
I do not know why our hand towels are considered bath towels. They are not nearly big enough, and I would not consider using them after a bath. I like my bath towels to be massive, big enough to wrap around myself a couple of times and still have enough left to dry my hair. These are called ‘bath sheets’, and they are still a cheat because they are not nearly as big as a sheet, which is disappointing.
I have got lots of ordinary bath towels that nobody uses for baths.
Today I thought I would make some of them smaller.
I know that I could purchase hand towels on Amazon, but there was not really enough change from the Chancellor’s present for that, and even if there had been it would have been a very boring thing to spend it on, what sort of person gets a windfall and buys new towels?
I cut them in half and edged them with bias binding. Then I sewed loops into the sides of them, so that we could hang them on a hook.
We do not have a hook but I am sure Mark will sort that out.
They all had loops in them anyway, although obviously only one, so I had to sew some more in. Also they all had a label saying IBBETSON on them, obviously because of school. The sheets are all the same. It does not lend itself to a rosily romantic atmosphere of swathes of silk and negligees. We can manage cotton, functional, white, named at both ends, which would meet Matron’s approval.
Only half of our towels say IBBETSON on them now, of course.
We might be moving on.
Have a picture of my walk.
