I have had a day of catching up with things.
I do not have to go away for very long before there seems to be a very lot that needs to be done, although admittedly the biggest excitement was the laundry.
There was a lot of this as well, because of having emptied the camper van of its load of sheets and towels. When I win the lottery I will send everything to a laundry every week, and insist that when it is all returned it has been thoroughly pressed flat and scented of lavender.
This lot was neither pressed nor lavender scented. I do have a big ironing machine, and I like the laundry very much when it has been thoroughly rolled through it, but on the whole I am too idle to use it. Today’s laundry was pegged in the garden to take its chances with the bird poo and the snails.
After I had done that, and trailed up over the fells with the dogs, I went to Booths. Mark is coming home tomorrow, and I felt morally obliged to refill the fridge with the sort of stuff that he might eat. I suspected that he would have been thoroughly disheartened to come home and discover several pots of yoghurt and cottage cheese, half a watermelon and some sticky smears.
I left it all where it was apart from moving a yoghurt pot over the sticky smears.
Once in Booths, I purchased some sticks of glutinous-looking lamb and beef and then remembered that we had sausages in the freezer.
There was no point in buying vegetables, unless they happened to be potatoes, and I already had some of those.
I like Mark coming home but his dietary preferences fill me with gloom. They occupy a very great deal of cooking and washing up time. Also he thinks he is on holiday when he comes home, and likes to sit around drinking cups of tea and speculating about the State Of The World. I am not on holiday, and although I can occasionally become interested in the state of the world, on the whole it takes up valuable busy-day time, and I spend most of his home visits rushing round frantically trying to cram everything into a day made two hours shorter by his presence.
I am very much looking forward to seeing him but I have had to become resigned to endlessly scrubbing sausage fat out of baking trays for the next few weeks.
I hate this job, and Mark eats a lot of oven-baked sausages.
It was gloriously sunny, which has been marvellous, although tiresomely the Weather Gods amused themselves last night by raining on the washing I had carefully pegged out before I collapsed into bed. I had left it pegged on the line because of knowing that there was more to follow it, and it got an extra rinse whilst I slept. The day turned out to be so balmily lovely that it dried afterwards anyway, so I forgave them, but it was a gloomy moment this morning.
Once I had refilled the cupboards and the washing line I came to the happy realisation that I had two whole hours before work with nothing much to do. I almost sloped off into the back yard to sit in the sun, but I have been listening to a Motivational Book about being self-disciplined, so I bounded off upstairs to see about writing my story instead.
It was not my finest hour. I discovered that in my determined failure to reach seventy thousand words I have written a very great deal of drivel. Indeed, I had written one bit twice over, and would have bored any potential reader out of their seat whilst a character patiently and never-endingly explained a crucial plot point to everybody else. The plot point could have been neatly summed up in about four lines, but somehow it had stretched out to three and a half pages.
I had the depressing experience of deleting most of it, so not only am I no nearer last week’s missed target of seventy thousand words, I am considerably further away than I was before.
I patched it and scowled at it and thought about it, and although it is no further on, it is restored a little.
I will write some more tomorrow, in between scrubbing out the baking trays after cooking Mark’s sausages.
