I am downcast.
I have finished my book.
It was a splendid book, a detective story written by JK Rowling whilst she was disguised as a man, and it was brand new and I had not read it before.
I bought it, secretly, a few weeks ago, and did not tell anybody because it was a tenner, which was a wickedly reckless extravagance during our time of bat-flu related financial embarrassment. I have never done that before, but I wanted it very badly and it was worth it.
I suppose I will own up to Mark eventually, or possibly lend him the book to read which would do just as well. He is not reading very much at the moment because the light in his taxi is a bit rubbish and he never seems to have remembered his reading glasses.
It was a brilliant book, and I am feeling very sad to have finished it. It was an actual book, not the sort you read on your computer, because peculiarly when I looked on Amazon the real paper and cardboard one was cheaper than the downloading sort, so I bought that. I regretted this a bit, because it turned out to be so thick that it would not fit properly down the side of my seat in the taxi, and kept falling out whenever I opened the door.
This was not really a disadvantage. It was a gloriously long book. There is nothing more satisfactory than enjoying a book very much, and being able to see from the weight of the right hand part of it, that I still have hour upon happy hour still left to go.
This becomes something of an anxious sadness as I progress through the book, and I have been trying to read as slowly as I could in order to delay the terrible moment.
I did not guess at all who had Dunn It. Next time I read it I shall know, and be able to find satisfaction in spotting all the carefully placed little clues. This will be good as well, and a happiness for some time in the future, but all the same I am sorry to have finished it now.
I am having something of a good book week, as it happens, because Number Two Daughter has bought a book on our joint Audible account that I would very much like to listen to. I can’t listen to it yet, because she is listening to it, on the other side of the world in Canada. If I started to listen to it as well then she would lose her place and get confused, but in a couple of weeks she will have finished and housework will be a pleasure again.
There are lots of good things to look forward to in this life.
I have not got many other exciting events to relate. I have had a day of trying to catch up on myself with jobs that needed to be done. I have cleaned Oliver’s school shoes and cooked some sausages and tidied up the last of the building clutter. This had been regrettably left still strewn about in the new living room. There were screwdrivers and bits of cork floorboard and a spirit level and a lot of dust.
I put the floorboards in the stove and the tools in Mark’s shed. I threw the dust away because we seem to have loads of it already.
Apart from that, I did not seem to get a very lot done because somehow I am just tired today, and everything seemed to be impossibly complicated and difficult to achieve.
I felt a bit uncomfortably guilty about this, because of course I should not be feeling tired. Mark is working just as hard as I am and probably harder, but he has not been complaining, or at any rate if he has been I have not been paying attention. I was actually very glad when the afternoon ticked away and it was time to go to work. This meant that I could stop trying to make the world a tidier place and go and be idle on the taxi rank.
Some days I am very glad that I did not pay attention at school. How awful to have to go and do something difficult.
I gave up with relief and went to sit on the taxi rank, where I finished my book.
Have a picture of some sausages, just for novelty value.
