We have had a day off.
It has been the sort of day off that finishes with going to work, but that does not matter. In fact it is rather a good thing that I have come, because nobody else has bothered at all, and I am the only taxi on the rank.
It is raining hard, and a lot of miserable sodden people are glad to see me.
Mark has not come to work because he has got to work all day tomorrow, and because he is busy doing things. I have been busy doing things as well, but my sort of doing things can be done reasonably easily on a quiet night on the taxi rank, because I have been writing my story and contemplating dragons. I was hoping to have finished it before the next module of my course, but frankly there is not the smallest chance, not even if I write all day every day between now and then, and I certainly won’t be doing that.
Mark has been doing things in the conservatory. We rushed around getting all of the day’s jobs done as quickly as we could so that we could have time left over for doing nice things, and when we had finished we sighed with happiness and turned to our leisure pursuits.
Mark tidied the yard up a bit, although not actually very much, and I am going to try and finish that tomorrow. We think that some rats have built a nest in the wall next to the drain. There are a lot of rats in Windermere, probably because of the tourists and their dropped ice creams and chip wrappers, and all of the exciting leavings from the dozens of restaurant kitchens. I have surprised a couple of them in our compost heap over the years, rats, not tourists, obviously, but Roger Poopy, who knows a thing or two about rats, is quite sure that they are just at the back of the drain, and I am not going to argue. Something has been in the compost heap and dragged the melon rinds out, and left them covered in little scratchy claw marks and teeth marks, and the other day we saw a tail disappearing into the ivy.
I do not like killing things but we have got to do it, and so we have put some poison down.
It is out of the way of birds and dogs and hedgehogs. I do not know why I think that hedgehogs are appealing and lovely but rats are horrid, but life can be full of contradictions sometimes. We saw our first hedgehog of the spring this week, but I think it was a bit early, there was snow on the fells this morning. .
Anyway, Mark tidied up and sawed up the firewood until it started to rain, and then he came in to the conservatory for his new and exciting project, which is a hydroponic planting pole.
Basically this is a drainpipe with holes cut in it. He heated the plastic around the holes and pulled them out so that it has got lots of little troughs. He has run a pipe down the inside of it and stood it up in a bucket, which he is going to fill with fertilised water. You can fertilise your water by keeping fish in it so that their poo becomes the fertiliser but you have got to have so many fish that I think it is cruel. Also I do not think fish would like living their whole lives in buckets. We have bought some liquid seaweed to start off with but we will also make fertiliser in the barrel at the farm. This works rather better than shop stuff but smells a lot worse, and I do not know what I think about it.
He has stuffed the drainpipe with rock wool, which is supposed to hold water really very well indeed, and he has installed a little pump to keep the water whizzing around the whole thing. He is going to put this on a timer when he has got one.
We have got some tomato and lettuce seeds to put in the troughs, and some little growing lights to stick around it for the long dark nights. It will all run on the batteries charged by the solar panel on the shed roof. Almost the whole thing has been built with stuff that we had got lying about, and everything else has cost about a tenner.
In no time at all Sainsbury’s can get stuffed.
We will be greenly independent.
I have got home and he has almost finished.
Have a picture of it.
