Mess

We are having a mess.

Mark has been at work all day and come home to continue with the flood-suppression project. We were going to work tonight as well, but had got so many domestic difficulties requiring our attention that we looked out of the window at the torrents of rain and decided that we wouldn’t bother. It is always rubbish in the rain, and Wednesday night is hardly a big moment for partygoers.

The mess is caused by a massive hole that has been lurking, for ever, at the back of my desk. You can’t usually see this because of the desk, and also because of the bit of board fixed across the back of it, but it is a hole to give us access to all the pipework for the jacuzzi bath and the shower on the other side of the wall.

There are lots of pipes for a jacuzzi bath, it is rather more complicated than the sort where water comes in at the taps and then swirls out down the plug hole. In the hole there are heating systems and tubes for circulating water and wires and, currently, a puddle. The whole lot is packed around with fibreglass so that the bath does not go cold in a hurry, and there are lots of spider-corpses and a very great deal of dust.

We have never been able to afford to run the jacuzzi anyway, but it is important that it is there ready for the day when we can. Our day will come.

My desk has been moved, and the hole exposed. The desk has had to be moved anyway ready for the new water-heating installation project, because the floorboards will need to come up. With this in mind I have moved everything else out of my office, and everything out of Lucy’s bedroom into Oliver’s room today. I hope that nobody wants to come and visit us. It is a huge mess.

Just to help the mess along the dogs had picked up a flea. They were all scratching like mad last night, which was so superlatively horrible that it woke us up. It turned out that it was a good thing we had been woken up, because we discovered that all the electricity had gone off, so the alarm and the overnight bread maker would not have worked. We would have been late and hungry.

We got the electricity to go back on in the end, although we  never found out what the problem had been, probably we have upset the Electricity Gods as well as the Water Gods, or maybe the last departing act of the irate Water Gods was just to fill the plug sockets on their way out.

Then this afternoon I loaded the dogs with anti-parasite drugs, shaved all of their hair off and bathed them. I squirted the house with lethally poisonous chemicals and washed all of their bedding. That should fix it. They are not scratching now. They are all shivering.

In other news I have started packing for Cambridge, and Ritalin Boy has his first night as a boarder tomorrow. He has had two days at his new prep school as a day boy, and likes it very much. He told me about it on the phone this evening, and sounded entirely chirpy and pleased with his world. I hope I am as thrilled about Cambridge when I get there.

I had another online Cambridge meeting this afternoon. Lucy Cavendish College held a Zoom session in order to tell us all about being at Lucy Cavendish College. I am very glad I will not have to live there. It all sounds just a bit like boarding school. You are not allowed to take your car, as if you were a rascally sixth former. However, I was very pleased to discover that the library is open all the time, night and day. How splendid to be going somewhere where a library is considered to be such a vital resource that it never closes, a bit like A & E.

More packing tomorrow.

I am going to go and shower away the million prickly bits of dog hair which are currently filling my underwear.

I am scratching like a dog.