The sun has stopped shining and it has rained as if all of the Gods had decided to empty their bathwater at the same moment.
It has been very, very wet.
Fortunately it did not start being wet until the end of yesterday, because we were busy painting.
Actually Mark was busy painting. I was busy clearing up.
This did not excuse me from the wobbly ladder, quite the inverse, although I went down instead of up.
I went to clear out the trench that sits below the garden, and which has become horribly filled with all of the mess that results from scraping about ten kilos of ancient paint off the front of a house, and then replacing it.
It is a fairly narrow trench, about ten feet deep, and runs along the front of two houses, ours and next door. It is just wide enough to stand sideways, and it has drains in the bottom. Ours has got more than just drains, because Mark has built a frame in it and we have got two large mirrors propped at an angle in front of the window, in order to reflect as much daylight into the house as possible.
These were absolutely covered in painting detritus and dead leaves. Bits of sandpaper and flaked-off paint, probably lead paint because it has been adorning the windows for well over a hundred years, and all sorts of muddy, smelly rubbish lurked there.
It was chilly and wet. I had to crawl underneath the mirrors and unblock the drain.
I was wearing gloves, so it wasn’t so bad, but it was a dark, foetid space, and I could not rid myself of the horror that a spider might crawl softly down the back of my neck, or that something slippery and malicious might just slither across my feet.
I shovelled everything up and washed the trench down. I washed the window and the mirrors and scrubbed the slippery green away from the walls, and clambered out into the sunshine with some relief.
After that I did some digging. It is a long time since I have done anything in the front garden other than close my eyes and try and ignore the vaguely guilty feeling, and some weeding was long overdue.
It didn’t take long before I started to remember how very much I like gardening, and within an hour I was enthused with plans for interesting things that we might do with it. Mark joined in with this bit, it is going to be splendid when we have finished.
We had planned to carry on and finish the painting today, but by then the rain had started, and showed no signs of desisting, so we went over to the camper van instead.
This was both wonderful and heartbreaking.
Everything has to be taken apart, and we have made a start today.
Mark has taken the passenger door apart, because it is crumbling into a doleful rusty heap and in any case was refusing to open. He says that he will rebuild it, and he will, but it is going to be a long job, it has got so many holes it put me in mind of a crochet blanket.
I started unscrewing things. I have taken plug sockets and light fittings down, and in the end Mark came to help me, and we dismantled some shelves. Then we began to drag the vinyl off the ceiling and the carpet off the walls. It is beginning to look terribly wounded, as though somebody has hacked at it and assaulted it, but actually it is beginning to expose the real injuries, the places where the timbers have rotted and it is beginning to collapse. We can see the first of those places now, the real, cancerous problems that must be carved out before it can finally be rebuilt
The tip was closed by the time we had finished, and so we left everything where it fell, we will clear it out next time, although we are saving absolutely everything that we can to be re-purposed in its next, Oriental incarnation. It is looking battered and hopeless, stunned at such shocking carnage, although we know that the reverse is true.
In committing so much dreadful, lethal-looking damage we are a step nearer to recovery, like the first, savagely bloody slices of the surgeon’s knife.
Poor camper van.
It will be wonderful in the end.
