I don’t know how it happens with dust, that however often you wipe it away there always seems to be more.
Mark went to work.
I can’t go out to work yet, because of course my job does not currently exist. I suppose really this is just as well, because in an unexpected revisiting of nineteen fifty, somebody has got to stay at home to do the dusting and to look after the baby.
Our baby is fourteen and has got hormones. All the same, it is probably better not to leave him alone. He would disappear in a puff of sarcasm.
I can’t even ask Mark to pop in at Asda on the way home, because of the queues. Shopping can no longer be done on impulse, in a five minute dash between other more interesting things. It has become a fully-fledged Task, all by itself. It is probably just as well that I have become a full time Little Woman At Home, because it means that I have got time to amble around Sainsbury’s and Asda, squeezing onions speculatively, and comparing the price of soap powder.
I did not go shopping today. I should have done, because yesterday I forgot to purchase anything healthily green. In consequence today when cooking dinner I had to add a lemon instead, which will be a surprise for Mark when he eats it. Oliver will not be affected, because he does not eat green things, unless discovered up his nose, I suspect. He has had a sandwich for dinner, made with the last of the sausages and liberal squirts of tomato sauce.
What a splendid example of stay-at-home-motheriness I have become.
In the end I recalled that we had some green things in the conservatory, and raided the celery and the mustard plant. I do not know what these will taste like mixed in with lemon and garlic, but I think it reasonable to assume that by the time Mark has arrived back home and sunk half a glass of wine, he will be so tired and hungry that he will not care.
I am going to be a single parent for some time, it seems. Ted rang up the other day, and Mark will be going back to his rural broadband installation work in a few days. He is still doing Number One Son-In-Law’s house, but the scrabble for cash is so pressing that he is going to carry on and do them both.
I am frustrated that I can’t help.
I am also frustrated to recall that despite a lockdown of endless domestic activity, we still have not finished installing the new kitchen.
It is installed a bit. I am using it, albeit without water.
We discussed it this morning, and I asserted, bravely and untruthfully, that I could probably do quite a bit of the work myself.
I considered this this morning after Mark had gone.
I need to start taking the old kitchen cupboards out.
They were piled high with everything that used to live in the dresser but has been removed whilst I have been busily sanding and oiling it.
I looked at them for a while, and then decided that it was just too hard. I cleaned the bathroom instead, which should give you an insight into how much I did not want to clear the cupboards out.
Eventually I came back down and put everything into carrier bags and stacked it all on the dresser. I had a different sort of colossal mess then, and an almost clear space on top of the cupboards.
I looked at this for a while and decided that this was too difficult as well.
I went into the garden and picked vases of sweet peas for the bedrooms. Then I watered the conservatory.
I went back and opened the cupboards. There was still stuff in some of them.
I went into the new kitchen and cooked chicken with surprise lemon.
After that I came upstairs to write to you.
The cupboards will still be there tomorrow.
Unfortunately.
The picture is a pumpkin in a newly-fashioned hammock. It is right over the walkway from the door to the kitchen, and has become troublingly huge.
