I am sure you will all be very relieved to hear that I am now entirely recovered from my shocking encounter with the would-be iPad thief, and the last couple of nights at work have passed without incident.
This is very much the way I prefer my gainful employment to be. It is not dignified for an elderly lady of almost sixty to keep getting into fights. I am quite sure that the dear late Queen never did such things.
My world has remained peaceful over the weekend, although of course, tonight is another night, and one can never tell.
I have been working late, as is my habit at weekends, and in consequence I am rather sleepy and quiet. Even after a five o’clock in the morning lights-out, I still seem to wake up somewhere between ten and eleven, and oblige myself to get up, because I do not like to waste the day. This is not as productive as it ought to be because of the yawning and daydreaming that inevitably follows.
Today has been very windy. I was almost blown over on my walk, and Mark’s windmill in the back yard is whizzing round as if it were auditioning for a role at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. This makes the water hot, which is always lovely. I do not much like those times of year when all our efforts are pumped into keeping the house warm, and I am obliged to wash my face in chilly water in the mornings, but just at the moment this is far from the case. We have both a warm house and hot water, there can be no greater domestic satisfaction.
In fact I am feeling quite contented with my world. Mark’s employer has coughed up at long last, not for this week but for a now long distant week worked in the middle of September, and so my current small financial troubles have been soothed. Our gainful employer, being the Unlimited Ibbets to whom you have already been introduced, has been kept afloat in the meantime by my taxi earnings, which are not great in October, and Oliver’s menacing door supervision activities.
We are going to survive for a little while longer.
In other news, I have managed to write a little more of my story, although not very much because weekends are always a bit full, and this afternoon we had a visitor.
Jack’s father has been up to visit us.
He brought back a mattress which has been at Lucy’s, and which is now standing in our living room, waiting for me to get my act together and heave it back across to the camper van, which is its true home. He had volunteered to take their new stove back with him, which is currently dumped in our conservatory waiting for the glorious day when we can lug it into the trailer and haul it down the motorway to warm Lucy’s house.
In the end he did not. This was because despite the fact that I had spent half of the day dreaming up new and interesting ways of hauling it outside and across the garden, when the moment for when getting it out of the conservatory and into the back of the car actually arrived, we all stared at it gloomily and felt uninspired, most especially Jack’s father who was already supporting himself with the aid of a crutch. It was not lost on us that even if we had managed to heave it in somehow, when it came to hobbling around and getting it out by himself, he might just find it a struggle.
Mark has got a small crane. I think we will employ that when we reach the point of removal.
It might be a more practical aid than a crutch.
When Jack and his father buzzed off, I rushed round watering the conservatory and mopping the floors before I came to work, and felt the satisfaction of having fulfilled my horticultural obligations for another week. Just the clean sheets and the dusting to be done tomorrow, and then I will be able to get back to my story.
This week might be a good week.
The trip is almost over. Mark will be coming home on Wednesday.
We might even manage to shift the stove.
