There was a lot of dust.
It was a gritty, plastery, cementy dust, and it was everywhere.
Regrettably Mark had neglected to close the washing machine underneath the new window.
There was a great deal of dust inside it.
I washed it all out and consoled myself with the thought that the remainder would rinse away with the washing.
I opened the soap drawer, which was also gritty, so I cleaned that. Then I picked up the soap powder and realised that the soap powder, which was in an open box beside the washing machine, had a thick layer of plaster dust all over it.
I scraped off what I could and just used the rest anyway, imagining that it might act a bit like a stone polishing machine, which in any case is basically a washing machine full of sand. We have now got beautifully polished trousers.
Of course I hardly mentioned this to Mark at all. I would not like to seem ungrateful for our lovely new window. A washing machine full of concrete dust is a small price to pay.
Mark apologised profusely and buzzed off to work. Today was an exciting day, because tomorrow he is going to have a day off, and we are looking forward to it massively. It has felt all day like getting ready for a holiday.
He is downstairs now. I do not know what he is doing, except listening to Gershwin. I can hear that bit, but there is hardly any banging or swearing, so perhaps he is asleep.
We have just eaten the most enormous dinner. We have discovered, to our surprise, that we were both suffering from an intense hunger for vegetables.
We have lived on sandwiches for months and months, enlivened by conservatory-grown tomatoes and celery, samphire from the garden, and the occasional raw carrot. Even on the very rare occasion when we have stayed at home, we have not made any dietary efforts more taxing than cheese and crackers, or, on a special occasion, cheese and pasta.
Now that we are not allowed to go to work I am cooking dinners for us, of things that are not cheese.
There have been some culinary adventures. We have been eating things that I have had stashed in the freezer for months after discovering them on Booths Everything Must Go Big Reductions shelf. For the last two nights we have been eating heavily discounted wild tuna fish, which, I might add, was divine.
The thing is that to go with it, every night I have I prepared an enormous dish of vegetables and baked them in the oven.
I really mean enormous. Between us over the last three nights we have eaten six carrots, eight parsnips, a bag of sprouts, three stems of broccoli, two cauliflowers, four sweet potatoes, three onions and two garlic bulbs. There were a couple of dozen new potatoes in that lot as well, all sprinkled with home-grown fennel and smoked paprika..
When it came to dinner, we practically ignored the fish and shovelled the vegetables in as if they were the last meal of the condemned slugs. We ate vegetables until we felt mildly uncomfortable. We could not squeeze any more in, but we wanted them all the same.
We think that we must have a dietary deficiency. We agreed that we could easily have ignored the fish, wonderful as it was, and just filled ourselves up on olive-oil-drizzled vegetables, sighing with contented repleteness at the end.
It is a bit misfortunate about the digestive consequences. We have always known about sprouts and wind, but some things just can’t be helped. We are not expecting visitors this evening, which is probably a good thing.
Have a picture of the Lake District. I did not take it today. The weather has been rubbish today. It was windy enough to seem hopeful for the washing this morning, so I pegged it all in the yard with high hopes, after which it rained.
