You will be pleased to hear that tonight’s accommodation is very much more luxurious than last night’s.
This is because I have moved thirty miles to the west and am now being cared for by Number One Daughter.
There are wonderfully clean cotton sheets on the bed and a fresh towel for my shower. It is a fluffy fat towel and I feel very decadent.
I have secretly got their dog in my bedroom as well, where he is not allowed to be, but we went for a last empty just before bed, and then he stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked at me so pleadingly that I could not resist, so we crept up together and he has got a bed made out of my yesterday’s clothes. We might be in trouble in the morning but it is so nice to have a dog lying quietly next to me that I will tell Number One Daughter I was scared of the spiders.
That is actually true. There are enormous spiders here. I have not seen any but Number One Daughter showed me some photographs and they are almost as big as the dog, I will need him to fight them off if they try and get in my bed in the night. I do not like spiders and these are huge.
I have left Oliver all on his own in Bath. We have moved him in to his new flat.
We had a very peculiar breakfast in the weird guest house this morning. We were not allowed to choose what we ate, but we were given some cooked things, and we made up for it with toast and orange juice. It was very odd. There was nobody else there, just us alone in a dining room with red and black velvet chairs, a red carpet, and a chandelier with only one lightbulb in it.
We ate quickly and sloped off.
The landlady met us at the flat. It is a charity so she was not personally interested, but gave us a lot of warnings about Bath council, whose rubbish department sounds to be as much fun as their parking department. If you get the wrong sorts of plastic mixed up in the bag they come round and make you eat them and then put you in the stocks where everybody empties their Food Waste bins over your head.
We read the instructions very carefully a lot of times, and hoped we had got them right.
Oliver is young. He will work it out.
We unpacked all of his things and hung everything up. His bedroom is lovely. It is big and old with sash windows and more cupboards than anybody could possibly need. In fact, the whole flat is lovely, except that it is on the very top floor, so everything had to be hauled up the stairs. It was such an exhausting process I felt as though it did not matter that I hadn’t walked up the fell, because I was sure I was at least two pounds of lard lighter by the time everything was done.
We pieced his clothes airer together and worked out the ironing board. The fridge door needs turning round to be on the other side but we did not have the right sort of screwdriver and he is going to wait until the others get there to help.
After that we went shopping. This cost a fortune but it has got him started. We filled his shelves in the fridge and freezer, and he has got everything that he needs, apart from the things we have forgotten. His new flatmates won’t be arriving until weekend, so he has got tomorrow to explore Bath and find out how to get to Norland on his bicycle. He is not quite as nervous as he was now that he has got himself settled in a bit.
In the end we were all done, and I had to leave him to it. He drove me back across Bath to the guest house where I had left my car, and we said our last farewells.
I hope he is all right.
After that I came here. Number One Daughter lives on an Army camp so I had got to be checked and photographed to make sure I was not a rascal or a terrorist before they would let me in. Number One Daughter thought this was a nuisance but I thought it was all very exciting, in the dark with bright lights shining on us and notices up warning us that there was a Heightened threat of villainy.
The only heightened villainy going on here at the moment is having the dog in my bedroom.
He is snoring very peacefully.
I am about to do the same.
