Monday is cleaning day.
It is the bane of the week, filled with dusting and sheet-laundry. Mark was busy doing camper van repair projects and cutting firewood, so I was by myself.
I cleaned the windows and hoovered and dusted, swept and mopped. I have sprayed so much Death To All Fleas on the carpets that they practically crackle when we walk on them, the carpets, not the fleas, that is. I hoovered it all away and sprayed some more. All of the domestic livestock has stopped scratching now, so probably the crisis is over, although it makes me itch every time I think about it.
The weather has been quite remarkably mild, and so I left the door open. This meant that the cats were at liberty to prowl as they wished, and by the time I had finished for the day there was a small cache of hunted dead things on the doorstep. There were three bees, two spiders, and a leaf. I suppose it is always good to start small, they will get to the rats in the end. I do not know how they managed the bees, I do not think I would like to try and catch one in my mouth.
I even watered the conservatory. The lemon tree has flowered, rather profusely, if even a few of them grow we will be able to have gin and tonic and whisky sours for Christmas.
In the meantime, Mark took the camper van for the man at the MOT garage to look at. He said that it needs the step on my side welding up, and to come back and put it through an MOT when it is done. We won’t get it done before we go to Scotland the day after tomorrow, so I will just have to try not to jump on the step. Mark said that it is not an impossibly difficult job, but it will take time, so it will have to wait for a little while until we can hop off the world for a while.
We knew that really, and in any case we have lately been having some anxious discussions about the camper van and its future. It is really not very well at all, and very soon it is going to need a lot of work doing to it. It is leaking in several places now, and sooner or later it is going to need a new chassis.
It is forty two years old. We should scrap it, but of course we are not going to, largely because we can’t afford another one.
Anyway, we like it.
Hence next year we are going to take it off the road for a few months again. We are sanguine about this, because we have done it before, and bad as it is now, it was a lot worse last time. We are going to try and keep it chugging along until Oliver has finished school, but after that it is going to need a prolonged stay in Doctor Mark’s Camper Van Hospital, actually in the bit at the bottom of the field where the National Park won’t complain about it.
A muddy field is not the best place to be doing a huge repair job, so if anybody has a spare camper van garage they are not using for the next summer, do let us know.
I stopped writing at that point and actually forgot all about this until I was in the shower, and am now in bed. If the quality of the prose deteriorates at all it is because I have a noisily purring cat helping me. She is very interested in the relationship between the tapping keys and the moving bits on the screen, and keeps trying to have a little go herself, she is a Person from Porlock if ever there was one.
I can hear Mark getting out of the shower, so probably it is time to stop.
I am going to go away and think about the camper van until I fall asleep.
