Sinful

Mark has had a third day off.

He is going to work from Tuesday until Saturday instead of Monday to Friday.

We know that this is wicked and sinful but we don’t care. The sun shone today for the first time for ages, and we had so many outside things to do that we did them instead of climbing wearily back on to the Monday morning employment treadmill.

Mark is only working for Number One Son-In-Law so it does not really matter, it is not like being a policeman or a neurosurgeon where people will notice if you do not roll up on Monday morning. Number One Son-In-Law will not mind if Mark works on Saturday, or even if he decided to start at lunchtime and do night shifts. He just wants him to finish building his house so that he can rent it out to people and become Barrow’s own version of Peter Rachman.

Of course he is not really like Peter Rachman. The Barrow house sounds to be absolutely splendid. They have had lots of lovely design ideas for exciting lighting and patterns of tiles and shelves fitted into wardrobes. You should never build a house that you would not like to live in yourself, and I think they would both be happy to live in this one, although probably not together.

Anyway, Mark did not go and fit any shelves today. He stayed here and cut up firewood and made our conservatory beautiful.

Actually he did not make it beautiful. In fact he made the most shocking mess, most of which we have cleared up now.

He was investing into its future beauty. This is like purchasing Rishi Sunak’s government bonds. You have a long anxious wait and with any luck you will get something out of it before you retire.

It was such a sunny day that I hung the washing in the yard and I managed to dry two loads, one after the other. Better weather hath no man than this, the Weather Gods must have gone on their holidays.

We went to the farm for more moss and bark for the ongoing archway construction project, and splashed around in the stream trying not to fall in as we picked the moss off the surrounding rocks. I have never looked very hard at moss before, and there are all sorts of different kinds, with star-shaped fronds, and ferny fronds, and great soft cushions in vivid shades of emerald green.

The mossy archways are going to be brilliant. I have finished the first one today, and it is ace.

I have attached a picture of Mark not being at work.

He is sitting in the conservatory under the skeleton window-arch, trying to join together two strings of fairy lights which we are building into the arches. They did not want to be joined together and behaved in irritating and inexplicable ways. They were not supposed to be the flashing kind, we checked this very carefully, but they flashed anyway, and then the first few feet of lights came on but the rest would not.

Mark regards this sort of thing as a personal challenge, and spent ages connecting and disconnecting wires and swearing. He got so fed up with them that he even left them plugged in whilst he snipped the wires, as you can see from the picture. He said that this was all right if you did not put them in your mouth, and indeed it must have been because he did not say ow even once, and I was listening carefully.

In the end he said that he would have to have a proper look later on, because he had got hardly any time left for fitting the water pump. This is to pump the rainwater into our conservatory flower beds on hot days, and it is going to run from a solar panel on the shed roof. This is not because we are trying to save the planet, although we will pretend that it is when anybody asks about it, in order to seem like middle class intellectuals. Mostly it is just because electricity is really expensive.

He has really got to go back to work tomorrow, because we are running out of spare days that he could borrow against at the end of next week, but it does not matter, because he has fitted the water pump now.

I can manage the archways on my own for a while.