Dear everybody,
I am sorry to say that it has accidentally become tomorrow and I have only just started writing my diary this very minute.
Somehow the world seems to have become so blurry that I can hardly see the page, and although I am telling myself that I am happy to have an opportunity to express my inner soul and record its joys and woes for posterity, right at this moment I think I would rather have a very belated early night.
I am not even intoxicated.
Well maybe a bit. I have had a glass and a half of Asda’s finest Budget Family Pack Red Wine.
This does not make you drunk as much as remorseful.
Anyway, the day ran out whilst I was fully occupied. We did not get round to dinner until half past eleven. Oliver finds this sort of thing challenging. They do not get distracted like this in the canteen at Gordonstoun, and on the whole, dinner turns up at school every single day.
I have messed that one up then.
We had cheese and crackers for dinner, which seemed to be more than adequate, accompanied by some superb Polish sausage, the proper kind, smoked and dried and hung under the eaves. I have done this myself with venison in the past, and it has been excellent, but this was better. The lodger’s boyfriend’s mother sent it from Poland, and it was divine.
I do like eating, hence the tendency to rotundity.
The lodger came to sit in the kitchen with me this afternoon. I was making Christmas presents, and wanted somebody to make encouraging noises, which she did admirably. This was kind of her, because mostly what I achieved was a huge mess, the last traces of which Mark is still clearing up downstairs as I write.
Mark helped with the Christmas presents when he came home, and then accidentally it was midnight.
I have not been making Christmas presents all day long. That would have been excessive devotion to duty. This morning I popped over to help the Peppers with their camper van. It is still in a state of mid-repair, and they have got to go away in it next week.
They have decided that the minimum requirement for unfinished camper vanning is a functioning loo and a heater. I am in complete agreement with this, being of the same generation.
Dear Young People. When you are fifty you have got to get up in the middle of the night. You think that it won’t happen to you, but it will.
Hence this morning we thought we would try and piece the bathroom back together.
We managed to fit the shower tray absolutely brilliantly, and it slid in like a dream. We siliconed it in and screwed it down and then discovered some more pipes that should have been installed underneath it first, so we had to take it all out again.
We had to put some string through the plughole and tie the waste pipe to the ceiling. This was to make sure that it did not waggle about whilst we were faffing about uncertainly, inserting and then re-inserting the shower tray.
In the end we did it, and then went to investigate the outside bit, where the tank gets removed for the purposes of emptying. The lock would not work, so since we were being DIY camper vanners, we took it apart to see what was wrong with it.
A squirt of WD40 fixed it, as indeed it fixes everything that does not need fixing with Sikkaflex glue, and then we could not work out how to put the lock back together again.
It featured some springs, which leaped out of our hands and bounced off underneath the van every time we got it wrong, like the penalty in an especially sadistic game show.
We knelt on the wet pavement for ages, fishing springs and sprockets and plastic levers and screws out of oozing piles of freezing mud and trying them in the lock casing in different places and at different angles, to see if we could work out what made a lock open when you turn the key.
I am not sure that I have quite understood it even now.
In the end we got so cold that we had to abandon it and leave it unlocked whilst they worked it out in peace and quiet next to the fire.
The Peppers are very security conscious but even they did not think that anybody would try to climb in through the loo.
They fixed it in the end, whilst I was making Christmas presents.
I was jolly very impressed.
It is no good. Posterity will just have to imagine the rest of my joys and woes.
I am going to bed.
Goodnight.
Have a picture of the sunset.
