I wrote these pages early last night, and after dinner we took the dogs for a bit of a mid-evening empty in the Library Gardens.
After about ten minutes of barking and ball-throwing there was a kerfuffle behind the trees, and Roger Poopy’s best friend Pepper appeared at a full-speed gallop, ears and tail flying, to hurl herself joyfully into the fray.
She was followed rather more slowly, and somewhat breathlessly, by her owners, who explained that she had leaped off her bed and made a massive fuss whimpering at the door until she was released from the gate, whereupon she charged across the car park and up the bank into the Library Gardens.
She must have recognised his voice.
We stood and chatted whilst the dogs hurtled around the grass in a noisy dog-wrestle, which involved lots of growling and rolling about until eventually they were exhausted. They lay around panting with lolling tongues then, both pretending that they had won.
We thought that we were having too nice a chat to stop, so instead of having a sensible early night we retreated to their guest house for some wine and sociability, which was ace. There is something especially lovely about other people’s sofas and gossip. After this we were late to bed and did not want to get up this morning.
It will be good for me to go back to work. I have never in my life watched so many films and talked to so many people and drunk so many glasses of wine. I have become an idle socialite.
I would never have expected that I would have enjoyed it so much.
All the same, tonight we really must have an early night…
The day started with even more socialising, because the dog-walk in the park has become a daily meeting of the Windermere Dog Pack.
We stand about and talk to one another, and the dogs belt around in a joyfully noisy morning frenzy. We encourage this because of the niceness of having friends and because the dogs all just go to sleep when we get back home.
We do not want to go back to work and for it to be over. We have built a very busy and happy lockdown life.
Of course we will go back to work. Taxi drivers do not have a union to argue about how far apart we need to sit. We will just get on with it. It will be good to get our immune systems up and running again.
Once we got home we carried on with our day’s projects. I made some more soap, because we were starting to run out, and Mark washed down the Other Dresser.
Regular readers might remember that we acquired this from Nan and Grandad some time ago, and it has been one of my nice things ever since.
Despite this, it has not been new for many years.
Durning those years it has had all sorts of adventures. We know about the brief stay in a shed and some misfortunate wine spillages, but there were many other scars whose provenance was a bit uncertain, and we have been looking at its patchy varnish for a while.
It is, as you can see in the picture, too twiddly to be easily sanded down, and so yesterday, with our hearts in our mouths, we followed some instructions that we found on the mighty Internet and washed it down with caustic soda.
This was a horrid scary thing to do, because we have never done it before. We love the dresser very much, and were very worried in case we might accidentally do something unkind to it.
Once it had all soaked in Mark cleaned it all off, and then this morning he washed it all down with white vinegar. You have got to do this so that the wood does not start to become the wrong pH. I learned about pH in school, but have forgotten it since, and only know because it said so on the Practical Woodworking website.
Anyway, the Practical Woodworkers were quite right, because when he had finished it was quite beautiful.
All of the flaking varnish was gone, and underneath it was smooth and lovely.
We are going to leave it to rest overnight, like the Practical Woodworkers suggested, and then tomorrow we are going to paint it with a fresh coat of varnish.
We are going to have the loveliest house in the world.
We won’t want to go back to work and leave it.
