It has been a busy day.
Number Two Daughter has bought a house.
Obviously this did not occupy a very great deal of my time, apart from a couple of telephone calls during which I told her how very pleased and excited I was, and then a little more time spent investigating it on the mighty Internet.
It appears to have been owned by somebody with an obsessive/compulsive disorder. It is so painfully tidy that the floor shines. I do not mean that it has shiny patches, the sort that appear when you have spilled something and then the dog has sat in it. I mean it gleams.
I am sure that they will sort that out soon enough.
Imagine Number Two Daughter with her own little house.
Also in my day today, I have finished, and dispatched, five thousand words of short story that I have first submitted to my university tutor, and then entered for a competition. I have got another thousand words to write for the university this week and then I have finished for the term, apart from submitting a title for my assessment piece.
I do not have the first idea yet what I might write and so the title is going to have to be fairly all-encompassing. Events In A Life, perhaps, or, if I am to go downmarket, Stuff That Happens.
I will have to contemplate this problem. I can’t remember when the title has got to be submitted, but it is soon.
I will worry about that tomorrow.
After that I congratulated myself on my virtue and rushed off to do some cleaning. This was not at all nice, because it is some time since I have done very much cleaning, and Mark has been helping. He does not really seem to see the point of cleaning, which is that when you have finished there is no dust.
There was still dust when I had finished, because I had just about become sick of it when the telephone rang, and it was Elspeth.
Elspeth has been living in Interesting Times. All of their electricity went off during the storms on Friday night, and it is still not back on.
I did try to call her to be consoling, but her telephone was not working either and so I did not bother. She mentioned that her other friends came round to see if they could help because the telephone was off, and I agreed that they must have been true paragons, but I had assumed that if she wanted anything she would probably manage to give me a ring somehow.
Indeed today that turned out to be the case, and they came round for a shower and to recharge their computers and to tell me all about it. Elspeth had brought a bottle of sherry with her to ease the afternoon along, but I was in the middle of baking cakes and thought I had better not. She forgot to take it with her when she went and so I am drinking it now.
They seem to be having some exciting adventures. It is not easy to run a life and a business when somebody switches your power off. I remember when the children had a brief stint at a state school in their extreme youth, and the electricity went off halfway through the school play. The headmistress stuck her head around the curtain and asked if anybody had any fifty pence pieces for the meter.
It was a state school, so nobody did.
This was one of the incidents that sparked my interest in private education.
Anyway, Elspeth has been managing without electricity since last Friday, although this evening she has managed to borrow a generator, which must be a huge relief. We went across later for the Grand Switch on, and I do not think even the similar event at Blackpool Illuminations has ever caused happier smiles. She thought she might stay up all night in case it ran out of fuel, but in the end we thought that probably she would not mind anyway if she was asleep.
The electricity company will presumably get it switched on again sooner or later. Half of Bowness is still in the dark, and hence we have not bothered working this evening, there is no point in hanging about hopefully outside closed pubs.
Every cloud has a silver lining.
I might have another sherry.
