Holesome

Downstairs Mark is clattering and banging and making dust.

I do not mind about the dust, that is to say, I do not mind very much because I am trying not to think about it. I will probably feel weary and fed up with it tomorrow when it all needs to be swept and hoovered and washed away.

It cannot be helped, however, because he is doing a Good Thing. He is putting the window between the kitchen and the conservatory.

As you might remember, there was once a doorway in the corner of the kitchen leading into the conservatory. This is not the actual doorway that we walk through, which is large and filled with a French window, but a spare one, which we did not use. The dogs never actually worked out that it was there at all, and if they got shut in the conservatory, they would not just walk into the corner and come in through the spare door, but stand at the French window and bark.

When we installed the washing machine and kitchen sink they slotted neatly into the spare doorway, and filled half of it up. The top bit stayed open, and we have just had a large hole between the kitchen and the conservatory ever since.

Obviously this is not brilliant as the weather gets cooler, because now that the nights are getting chillier, we do not sit in the conservatory very much. Actually we are rushing about so much that we do not sit anywhere very much. We have got a wonderful raspberry pink sofa in our new living room and so far we have sat down on it twice, and on one of those occasions we got up after ten minutes because we had got other things to do. When we do sit down we sit down in front of the fire, because we can just jump up and down to do things in the kitchen

I expect that this will change when we are the owners of a television.

Hence the French window doors have been closed in the evenings, and the conservatory allowed to become cool. This happens partly because it still has some holes in the roof, which Mark is going to fix one day.

It does not get cold, because it has got hot water pipes underneath the floor, and so it is still keeping us in tomatoes. It is even growing some little clusters of new tomato plants where some ripe tomatoes plopped into the bed and were ignored.

I am not a tomato, however, and if I am going to sit around drinking wine and eating dinners, I like my world to be warm.

We kept the warm air in the house by hanging some curtains at the window into the conservatory. This worked brilliantly well, because they were the heavy-duty, thermal lined ones that used to be in the old kitchen, and barely a draft seeped past them.

We have been waiting hopefully for a window ever since.

Today Mark has got all the bits of window that he needs, and he is bashing the hole apart to make it big enough so that he will be able to fit a frame in. With a window it is important that the sides go up in a straight line, and that it has got a nice flat sill to sit on. You can make some of these problems right with window glue, but not all.

I once had to ask for putty in a French hardware shop, and did not know the word, so I asked for window glue, which worked. It is actually called Le Mastic, if ever you need to buy French putty.

I went downstairs at that point, to take the photograph. You can see that it is very nearly finished. Even better, Mark said that if he managed to finish fitting the window tonight, he would use his day off later on this week to fix the hole in the roof. It is only a bit of a hole, where the conservatory meets the house. It needs the boarded-up cavity to be filled with insulation and some flashing putting over the top.

All the same, holes in one’s house are never a desirable feature, whether they are big ones covered by curtains, or little ones in the roof.

Tonight I am very pleased to announce that very soon we will not have very many at all.