It isn’t snowing, but it has been the sort of day when one feels as though it might.
Obviously it won’t, we are in September, not January, but all the same there has been a chill in the air and hopeless iron-grey skies, and I have shivered and been glad of the lit fire, glowing red in the newly swept and painted stove.
Autumn is with us, sliding through the cracks under the doors and breathing chill through the still-open windows.
I like the autumn, even this year, when like Narnia, a winter without Christmas yawns drearily in front of us.
Of course we are going to have a Christmas, although it will be on a rather smaller scale than usual, and lots of things will be different. There will be no pantomime, unless Boris disappears with a bang and a puff of green smoke and the Good Fairy rescues us all. It doesn’t sound as if there will be Christmas markets, and I am most certainly not going to go out for Christmas dinner if I have got to wear a mask and give my telephone number to the chap at the Indian restaurant in order for some malfunctioning App to insist that I spend the next two weeks in prison.
I am rather enjoying the challenge of planning something different.
With any luck our saving plan will have worked and we will be the owners of a television by then, which will help. We can have a Christmas Day walk up to the top of the fell, eat lots of nice things and then collapse on the raspberry pink sofa to drink excessively and watch a film. I like the sound of this very much. We could even order a takeaway, which would make it exactly the happy ever after I have been planning.
I don’t suppose we will order a takeaway. I think I will call Yew Tree Farm in Coniston and order a goose.
A deceased goose, obviously. The fat is useful for pastry afterwards.
I am planning all of these joys by way of encouraging myself. Right at this moment a jolly Christmas with a festive tree and smiling children and nutcrackers and mistletoe and playful kittens all seems the stuff of impossible daydreams.
What I have actually got so far is a concrete floor with a dreadful teetering dust-sheeted stack of second-hand furniture piled on top of it, and a cracked television propped in the corner which only does films which have been made at mid day during midsummer. There is an excess of sawdust and plaster dust, and we have just realised that Mark is going to have to cut a hole in the newly painted wall to poke some more wires through.
Fortunately it will just be at the top of the wall, where there is only white paint, but there won’t be any less dust.
It is all taking ages and ages, and there still seems to be so much to do. I did some painting before I went to work, and Mark fitted the cooker hood extractor when he came home from work, before he went to work again, but we still seem to be swamped by dozens and dozens of things that we have not yet done.
I have attached a picture in order that you can see the furniture mountain. It is the enormous mis-sharpen pile behind the stairs, and it takes up a very lot of space.
This is causing me some concern, because in order to put a carpet in the living room, if ever we manage to be so organised, we are going to have to put the furniture somewhere else whilst we do it, and what you see is all the space that there is.
We have been discussing this, but have not yet come to a resolution.
Maybe we could put it in the garden.
I have almost finished painting the birthday present living room, although I have run out of the gold sticky stuff, so some bits are going to have to wait for a bit longer.
Not to worry. One way or another I am sure that it will all be over by Christmas.
