I am at Lucy’s, engaged in the peculiar occupation of fighting off a cat whilst simultaneously composing an inspired piece of deathless prose to entertain you over your cornflakes.
The cat disagrees with me about who has the prior claim to the keyboard.
I have just booted her off, and she has stalked off to claw some holes in my towel, just to show me exactly what she thinks of me.
My towel is too far away for me to do anything about it. At least, it is too far away for me to do anything about it without actually getting out of bed, which is not going to happen at this time of night. It has been a busy day.
I have just flung my glasses case at her, without result. I will have forgotten that by morning and will have ten minutes of fruitless searching until eventually I find them behind the ironing board.
That is tomorrow’s problem.
Today has had plenty of problems of its own. We have fixed so many things you could make a programme about us on the television.
You could call it Rubbish At DIY.
Honestly, we have done loads.
We plasterboarded a new wall and anchored in some posts in for a washing line. We hung the washing out in the garden after that, and it dried beautifully. Regrettably we were distracted by the time it rained, and it was not until Lucy noticed people scurrying down the road with umbrellas that we thought about it, by which time it had had a thorough freshwater rinse.
After we had installed our splendidly carbon-neutral solar drier, we went to a carpet shop to buy a tiny bit of carpet to put in the tiny bathroom. It cost us a tenner, and it is a nice carpet. We have not fitted it yet but we have bought some new Stanley knife blades for when we do. I am not exactly looking forward to that moment. I am really not very good at fitting carpets, having the spatial awareness and co-ordination of an elderly cat that has just been taken for an amusing ride on a high-speed roundabout.
That is tomorrow’s problem as well.
We went to B&Q as well.
B&Q is a truly upsetting place. There are miles and miles and miles of things that you might need if you are building a house, all carefully sited about a twenty minute walk from one another.
We bought all of the things we thought we should install in the bathroom before we laid the carpet. There was a towel rail and a loo roll holder, a mirror and some shelves. One of the shelves finished up being a sort of self-help job, and the mirror fittings were so rubbish that after we had broken one we just sawed a groove in a piece of timber and used that instead. I thought this was very ingenious but Lucy just said that she supposed she would get used to it.
It doesn’t come off the wall, so far at least, which is all that matters.
Also I think perhaps the spirit level doesn’t work. It doesn’t seem to matter how very careful we are, everything seems to lean, perhaps the bubble is heavier at one end than the other.
All of this took ages, all of the rest of the day, actually, apart from a very pleasing interlude when my parents called in for coffee, and we ceased all activities with some considerable relief and sat down to shirk. My mum had made us some cake, which we decided we would save for breakfast, and some garden tools which I meant to use for digging out the stinging nettles in Lucy’s back garden, and then forgot. If I hadn’t forgotten I would have noticed the rain and saved the washing.
I found the stinging nettles when I was hanging the washing line in my flip-flops. They need digging out before they get any bigger.
I think that can be tomorrow’s problem as well.
How I am looking forward to getting up.
At least we can have cake for breakfast.
