I am feeling very pleased with myself tonight.
Tonight I have remembered to bring everything I needed into bed with me.
Last night I was not nearly so organised and the result was a tiresome series of processions up and down the stairs, wrapped in a towel because I had not thought to bring a dressing gown. I had forgotten my computer, then my glasses, then a glass of water, then I couldn’t find my handkerchief. By the time I finally got around to writing to you I had practically worked off my dinner just getting ready to go to bed.
There is still cat hair all over the computer but I am pleased to say that the cat seems to have buzzed off, and tonight I am here in dignified solitude. I think they are all in bed with Lucy actually, it is a good job she has got a double bed. I do not know how she will ever find room for a boyfriend.
We have had rather a productive day, actually. It started very early, because there are no curtains on my window, and so I really was awake with the sun. By eleven o’clock we had cleaned lots of things, done lots of washing, and were setting off for B&Q. We stopped to look at carpets on the way. We are not going to purchase a carpet yet. There is no room for it because of all of the shovelfuls of dust.
We bought some shelf-building ingredients and some wall-building ingredients, which made the journey back in Lucy’s car rather excitingly cramped, and there were some bits sticking out of the back. Fortunately she is a police officer so if anybody had stopped us we could have said that the police already knew, thank you.
We had a cup of tea when we got back, because we thought that we had deserved it. I sat and watched Lucy’s excitingly urban environment. I like her neighbours. They play very nice reggae music and never seem to get dressed. I have seen them several times today and they have all been wearing their dressing gowns every time, even when they were going for a walk down the road. I would not like to do this, it would be a disappointing anticlimax when you eventually came to get ready for bed. There would be no pleasing sense of bedtime novelty.
Lucy said that it is just because Oldham has a different sort of climate to the Lake District and that people do not get dressed there because of being middle class but because they would die of hypothermia if they didn’t.
After I had spent some time being suitably nosy about what the rest of the street was doing we had to get on with the wall-building, and so we did, and on the whole it went very well indeed.
It is not exactly like riding a bicycle, the sort of thing that you recall perfectly even after thirty years, but we made a reasonable hash of it and we now have all of the timber in for a stud wall and most of the shelves up. We are going to try and finish off tomorrow before I have got to go off to work.
We had some visitors in the afternoon. My parents came round, and we pretended that we were only stopping for a cup of tea just to be sociable, because we were terribly busy, but of course it was the most massive relief to have an excuse to stop and we loafed about eating biscuits for as long as we could. It was splendid to see them, not least because they brought a bottle of wine and some chocolate Easter eggs, and in my opinion there could be no finer way of visiting, but also because it was just nice, and we had a happy afternoon catching up on news.
When they had gone we had run out of excuses and had to get on with the construction activities. We had another visitor later on, when the next door neighbour very kindly called around with some beautifully decorated cakes to energise us after our day’s labours, which we thought was touchingly kind, and which we wolfed down with enthusiasm.
It was late by the time we were obliged to desist, not least because we did not want to be noisily drilling holes in things once the world had gone dark, of course the rest of the street was already ready for bed.
It is going to be all right. We are managing to reconstruct a house.
It is going to be all right.
