Not too much diary tonight because I am so tired I am longing for a quiet half hour just to read my book and not need to think about anything.
My book is a splendid story about criminals, written by a real barrister, and I am enjoying it. Also it has big print which is always a bonus.
For the last week I have been reading a book about Indian gangsters, but have had to stop because everybody in my dreams last night was both brown coloured and rascally. I do not wish to become an inadvertent nocturnal racist, and so I am going to put it away for a little while until I have had some different adventures to distract me when I am going to sleep.
It is a problem with an uneventful life. My sleeping brain has got to get its creative inspiration wherever it can.
Today has not been uneventful. Today has been very busy, which is why I am too tired to write much. I have made some fudge, with grains of smoked salt, and some peppermint chocolate and some mayonnaise. After that I emptied all of the flower pots in the conservatory and dragged out the seed bed.
The conservatory came to a rather sudden halt whilst we were ill. It had grown and grown until it was all rather like a darkened corner of a tropical rain forest, complete with huge spiders and butterflies. It was so hot and damp whilst we were ill that the whole thing began to rot.
You have to keep on top of the falling leaves when you are growing things like tomatoes, because they come loose and then just go brown where they are. These had been neglected for so long whilst we were loafing self-pityingly in our sickbeds that they had begun to go black. Indeed, there was a whole canopy of blackened, rotting vegetation awaiting us when we finally staggered back into life.
You do not need a house full of mould spores when you have already got a virus attacking your lungs. That is how you get pleurisy.
I do not really know what pleurisy is, except that it makes you cough, and we are certainly doing that, so you can’t be too careful, that’s the thing.
As soon as we could stand for long enough, and before I even started on writing this again, we spent one long, exhausting, filthy day dragging all the mouldy tomato plants and the pumpkins out and filling the compost heap.
It was truly horrible. We closed the doors into the house and opened the conservatory windows to try and keep the mould out. We coughed and groaned and had to stop every few minutes, and indeed, by the end I could hardly stand, and Mark did the last of it.
I can’t describe the awfulness of that dreadful, sick day, but it worked, and now the conservatory is clean and mould-free. Relatively. I am still trying to work myself up to getting it all scrubbed. The windows are filthy but they can stay like that until I am feeling a bit more energetic.
There are still lots of other plants, but they are the glossy-leaved sorts that do not need so much worry. There were lots of wood lice and spiders as well, frantically dashing for cover as I picked things up. I do not know where they all come from. When we first moved into our English house after rural France we were astonished by the pristine creature-free sterility of the UK. We seem to have solved that in our house, at least.
I dragged out the empty seed bed and emptied all the plant pots, and by the end of it I was wobbly and coughing all over again.
It is done, though, and we are a step closer to being able to be house-proud again.
I am done as well. I am going to go and read my book.
Thank goodness we don’t have to get up tomorrow.
