This morning I cut up the camper van sheet for dishcloths.
I had not expected that this would make me feel sad, but it did.
We have had that sheet on the camper van bed for fifteen years, since Oliver was tiny. I thought I would buy some new ones when we renovated the camper van, years ago, and we did, but it turned out that I did not like the feel of them as much as the old ones, and so they went on the spare room bed in the loft, and the old ones came back.
Even the old new ones are now worn out, and were cut up and hemmed into handkerchiefs, for second-best use, because you cannot blow your nose on a bit of old pink flowery sheet when you are talking to the headmaster of an expensive boarding school.
Today, daringly, because I have not yet tried the new sheets, I cut the old, threadbare, see-through sheet up for cloths, and felt like a slaughterer in an abbatoir.
We have slept on top of that sheet in France, Germany and Belgium. It has given us peaceful, familiar nights up and down the UK from Orkney to Brighton.
Now it is gone. It is in a couple of dozen pieces, folded up neatly in cupboards to clean the bath and the windows and the oven.
I was going to use them for dog-sick, but that felt like a treachery too far.
I ought to give some to Mark for use in his shed, but that felt just as bad. I might give Mark the old dishcloths, which are cut from a less memorable sheet, and keep these. Old friends, and all of that.
I wonder if people might like them for Christmas.
I put the first piece to use straight away, to wrap some salted celery and carrots for them to weep into ready for salads for dinner.
Afterwards I used some more of it for cleaning the downstairs mirrors, by which time I thought it should probably have begun to settle into its new life.
I went across to the camper van then, to look at the bright new sheets, and to replace the newly-washed towels and dishcloths. Also I needed to hunt for my boots. I had left these in the bottom of the wardrobe, and have had irritatingly wet feet ever since.
It was a good job I did, because not only did I collect my good waterproof boots, but I discovered that I had left one of the roof lights open, and shortly afterwards, the heavens opened.
I do not know what has happened to global warming, we can’t possibly have fixed it already, but I think that this is the coldest May I can remember. It is all very well for Oxford students to have their Hooray Hooray, the First of May, rhyme, telling the world about rascally things which might happen outdoors from that day forward, but if it is warm enough in Oxford then they are doing very much better than us here in Cumbria.
I had got some computer things to do this morning, one of which, incidentally, was to try and make this website more secure so that it could have an HTTPS. It does not need one of these, because nobody ever gives me any money on it, but it keeps being blocked by Facebook and Oliver’s school, who think it ought to have a little padlock next to the title at the top.
I did not manage this in the end, because it would have cost eighty quid, and I am far too tight to cough up for that, but by the time I had finished I was so cold that went downstairs and lit the fire, and then hovered around it for ten minutes, trying to feel my feet again.
I discovered then that I had somehow managed to put my website out of action altogether, and spent an embarrassing half an hour on the telephone to the web hosts, in between wet customers this evening.
If you are reading this then I have fixed it.
Have a picture of Roger Poopy with the love of his life.
