Our world is becoming restored.
Mark has been in the yard cutting up firewood and I have been restoring our house to its usual, tranquil state.
The new chainsaw is already coming in very useful. As it turned out it had its paperwork with it and we learned to our amusement that its previous owner, whom we had already thought was probably as dim as the last few flickering moments of a cheap tea-light, was selling it because after its original purchase he put the wrong fuel in it. The result was that he couldn’t get it to work and had to pay a further fifty quid to get it fixed. On its return he managed the right fuel, but tipped it into the wrong hole, after which he gave up.
Probably this is just as well. There are no intelligence tests to qualify a person to use a chainsaw, but I suspect he might not have scored very well. From the point of view of our poor overstretched NHS it is probably a very good thing indeed that he has ceased in his efforts to work out what lumberjacks do, and perhaps limits his fantasies to the purchase of a check shirt instead.
Anyway, Mark has it working perfectly well now, and the day has hummed along nicely to the merry background buzz of the creation of a tidy pile of firewood.
This is always a great pleasure. A stack of firewood which is taller than I am and runs the length of the yard reassures me that we will not be cold for a little while yet, and indeed the house is wonderfully warm. Even the conservatory is warm, and we had coffee in there this morning. Indeed, the little seeds that I planted in Mark’s hydro-planting drainpipe are doing very nicely so far, we have cotyledons in abundance. I will let you know if they progress rather than becoming overwhelmed with seasonal self-pity and keel over, which is always a danger with this sort of project.
Lucy took Oliver’s nice girlfriend to the station and I swept and tidied until my petty domestic soul was soothed. We had left in such a rush on Tuesday that our forgotten jug of tea was still standing forlornly on the top of the stove. It had thoroughly stewed but we drank it this morning anyway, waste not want not and you never know when there might be another war.
After that Lucy and I filled the morning with a fluster of paperwork. Her printer had given up its already ancient existence just as solicitors and estate agents and Human Resources Departments began simultaneously pestering her with endless heaps of documents to be manually signed and returned, and she had all sorts of Pending Agreements and Declarations which had to be printed and signed and scanned and emailed. All of this would have been much easier had it not been for my computer unexpectedly declining to address the printer. The seemed to be the result of an elderly huff which Safari informed me was because it was too old to be updated and so nothing would work any more, which was my own fault for being too mean to purchase a new one.
Since I only bought it in 2011, and it is not even as old as my taxi, I do not see that this is any excuse, and we faffed about with it for ages until eventually it gave way, albeit with a bad grace, and creaked pages of smeary Declarations out through the printer. Lucy signed them, and we dispatched them into the magical cyber-universe until finally she had no more.
She has done all of the house-purchasing paperwork that can now be done. She has promised the police that she will be diligently investigative, and she has told the various relevant authoritative bodies that she has at last shaken the dust of Kettering from her shoes and would now like a refund of Council Tax and the deposit on her flat back.
She has reached the end of a small era.
It is time for a new beginning.
