The day did not get off to a brilliant start.
It is Clean Sheets Day, and whilst Mark was making coffee I bent down to strip the covers off the dogs’ cushions, and put my hand in a pile of disgusting dog sick.
I was not pleased.
There was a lot of yelling.
Roger Poopy slunk off under the table, and Rosie looked astonished, so it was not difficult to work out who had been responsible. I told him that nobody loved him, and that he had been an unwanted Clearance Poopy even when he had been small and at his most wide-eyed and appealing, and that any more of his revolting internal products on my carpets would lead him directly to the Dog Pound.
He was very upset. I remembered after a while that he actually speaks more English than we think, but I still could not bring myself to feel very sorry.
Mark went out to the van to glue the throttle cable into it whilst I took the dogs over the fells afterwards, so that any further mishaps would not disgrace my carpets. It was a glorious morning, brilliant with sunshine and achingly blue skies, and he forgot about being in trouble because Rosie is coming into season, so he is falling in love with her all over again, and had to be booted off, ignominiously, several times.
He does not bother being in love with her in the house, just when we go out anywhere, preferably where there might be spectators, as if he were the sort of person who grew up with an ambition to star in the sort of films that the Video Man used to hide under the dashboard of his van. It is one of those happy dog traits that makes you wonder exactly why you thought dog ownership would be a beneficial stress-relieving activity the way rubbish articles on Facebook pretend that it might be.
Mark did not quite finish the throttle cable, but he will get it done tomorrow, and then we can make a real start on our exciting new Van Restoration Project
I want to take it to the garage to give it a good scrub with the jet wash first. It has become dreadfully dirty over the winter.
After that we are going to take everything out of it so that it is ready to be rebuilt.
We talked about this all the time whilst we had our cup of tea this afternoon. It was a prolonged cup of tea, because we had resolved that we would get our shoes clean whilst we were idling. These were our smart shoes that we wore to Cambridge weeks and weeks ago, and which have been sitting, grubbily, in their boxes in the corner of the kitchen ever since. They have been a blot upon my conscience for absolutely the whole of the intervening time, which is absolutely ages, as I am sure you will remember, although not enough for me actually to do anything about it, just enough to spoil any contented peace of mind in which I might otherwise have indulged. Indeed, I have done nothing about them other than wished, unsuccessfully, that they would just go away.
They have gone away now. They have been polished and buffed until they are all gleaming, and then lovingly packed back into their boxes and stacked neatly at the bottom of the wardrobe. This made me feel very pleased with myself, and satisfactorily reassured of my qualifying place amongst the middle-classes. Obviously I was pleased with Mark as well but less so because he does not care about qualifying for the middle classes and just likes shiny shoes.
Once that was done I was obliged to break the gloomy news that as with every Monday, it was Clean Sheets Day and hence the day for hoovering and other similar tedium. He knew about the clean sheets, because they were already flapping in the yard by then, but was not enthusiastic to discover that the rest of the day was about to be filled with unproductive monotony.
It had to be done, of course, and we did it. It will not need to be done for a whole week, hurrah.
We had almost finished when the phone rang, and it was Number One Daughter. She has been in an international competition to see who is the very fittest person of her age in the whole of the world. She has been going on about this for ages and worrying that she might not be fit enough to be able to consider herself a truly fit person.
Today she told us that she finished seventh in the world, although, she added, self-deprecatingly, she did not think that everybody else in the world had been really trying properly.
She is going on to the World Championships this summer. This is in America, so probably we won’t be able to go with her, but it is very exciting.
I am not one of the fittest people in the world, I am not sure that I would even make the top five on our street.
I will have to be contented with having some shiny shoes.
