I am writing this in a hasty few minutes between carpet fitting.
Mark is cooking dinner whilst I bash out a few lines to you, and then we are going to get on with it.
We are trying our very best to get the camper van finished, which at the time of writing these words, it isn’t.
This is because the serious unfinished-camper-and-back-to-work-tomorrow panic did not actually hit us until a the middle of the afternoon. Up until then we had been milling around fairly gently, looking at things and pondering our progress, the way you do on a sunny day, as if we had a background soundtrack being played by somebody with a floppy velvet hat and a saxophone.
At four o’clock we realised that we had not nearly finished, and that we have got work again tomorrow. Hence we had a bit of a flap. Now it is the middle of the night and we are not loafing with glasses of wine and Netflix. We are trying to make the camper van look young and beautiful again.
It is the problem with all of this tiresomely excessive daylight. It is not like winter, when you can feel perfectly justified in pouring the first glass of wine around four o’clock if you feel like it, because it is dark and you have closed the doors and curtains anyway, and probably there is nothing terribly important that needs to be done, because it is winter.
In the summer when it hardly goes dark enough to undress without half of the street noticing, work seems to expand to fill absolutely all of the daylight, and there is loads of it.
We are going to go back to the camper van very shortly, and fit the last bit of carpet, that is, if we do not accidentally drink too much before we get there.
I think I ought to say that over the last couple of paragraphs, during which I have drunk half a glass of wine, I have begun to feel a little more pessimistic about that possibility.
We have, as I explained, been fitting carpets. Not to the floor yet, that will be the last of all, mostly because it is absolutely covered in Mark’s tools. We have been glueing carpets to the newly-erected walls, to make them beautiful and to keep us warm in Arctic-flavoured Scottish winters, the last of which seems still to be in progress.
Obviously we did not have enough carpets to do this. We have only got a very small house and it is stuffed to the eaves with the sort of clutter that one of us thinks might come in useful, hence there is not room for very many rolled-up carpets.
There was room for some, though. One had come out of the new living room, and one had come when we scavenged the new kitchen, and one was an off-cut from Number One Son-In-Law’s house, but they were little bits, and not enough.
In a moment of inspiration, we went into Kendal to see what the carpet shop had in their skip.
Obviously we asked them first, and equally obviously, they did not mind, because it means that they will not have to empty their skip quite so quickly.
We found some treasures.
There was no truly thrilling carpet. They sold us a wonderful green-and-pink-and-gold confection for the living room floor last year, and I was hoping for something like that, but there was none. Instead there was some deep blue, some grey, and some very peculiar recycled stuff that we examined closely and then pinched the lot.
It seemed to be made of tiny bits of chopped rubber on one side, and recycled fibres on the other. It is presumably a sort of hard-wearing underlay, possibly intended as a sort of sound proofing.
We decided that it was absolutely brilliant on all fronts, far better than underlay. We brought it home and used it for lining all of the lockers. The lockers are horribly draughty, because the doors do not shut properly, you have got to twist a bolt with a spanner to open them. This is an invention of Mark’s because the original lock got bashed off in some misfortune once. We thought it might also help to keep the noise down a bit. The camper van is a noisy old thing, and rumbles along like a steamroller with a hangover.
Mark glued carpets to the walls and I painted the kitchen cupboard, the one with the new shelf. It is a lovely new shelf, and I thought that I would be able to fit lots of new stuff in there, but somehow the stuff that I already had just seemed to expand when I put it back. I fitted it all in as neatly as I could, but to no avail, both shelves filled up by themselves, probably whilst I was examining the sell-by-date on the water chestnuts.
I was very pleased with it anyway. I made a little curtain to hang across the front, and it would not now be out of place in Mr. Tumpy’s caravan.
We have done everything except the floor. That is the very last.
LATER NOTE: We ate dinner and did not go and finish off. We will worry about it tomorrow. We have had another glass of wine now.
Have a picture of a chap in a skip.
