I am feeling quite pleased with myself.
I have just managed to place an order with Online Asda.
This is not an easy task, I can tell you, involving ages and ages of scowling at multi-coloured pictures of soap powder and trying to work out which one we might want. In the end I called Mark to see if he preferred Biological or Non Biological, Tropical Flavour or Basic Soap Flavour, but tiresomely he didn’t seem to care, so I had to make the decision all by myself.
Despite these difficulties, it is a jolly lot less trouble than trailing into Kendal to load it all into a trolley with wobbly wheels and then shove it all into the back of the taxi, possibly around the dogs. It will turn up tomorrow afternoon and all I will have to do will be to put it away, which seems to be the most magnificent shirk.
I will be glad not to have to bother faffing about with shopping, because we have had a busy weekend. Today has been Sunday, and frustratingly short, because of working all night on Saturday. By the time we got up, just as the rest of the world was starting to think about washing up the dishes after their Sunday lunch, there was barely enough time to get the washing dry.
There was lots of washing because there are four of us.
Oliver’s girlfriend Emily has got a job. She is working in the Albert, where Oliver himself was a kitchen porter in his youth, and rather improbably, seems to be enjoying it.
Hence by the time I had finished dashing about doing the day’s unavoidable tasks, it was time to go to work and I could not get on with what I really wanted to do, which was to start making our new arches look like trees.
We went over to the farm yesterday and filled a couple of sacks with just-beginning-to-rot tree bark for this very purpose. This was left behind from a massive stack of now-incinerated logs, and it will be the basis for planting interesting things on our newly-installed garden arches. I am looking forward to this job, mostly because I am not thinking about the shocking lacerations that anything to do with chicken wire always seems to inflict upon my person. By the time I had finished constructing the conservatory arches I had to wear long sleeves for a fortnight, like the sort of teenager who thinks that sore arms will help them not mind so much that they don’t have a boyfriend and nobody understands them.
Mark was in the back garden making the flag pole. We have not yet got the flag, which has been ordered on eBay, but the flag pole needs to be properly installed before it turns up, and so he has been busy.
In between rushing around we have actually had rather a splendid weekend. We had breakfast with an old school friend of mine on Saturday when he and his wife came to visit, and they met us in the little bistro across the road.
I think it might have been lunch for them, but we had been working very late the night before.
Wine is never a good idea for breakfast. It makes my nose go pink and makes me giggle, like the sort of teenager who has got a date on Friday night and whose father has just offered to increase her allowance.
We were not daunted, and had the most magnificently peculiar breakfast of satay chicken and white wine and soda, which might be less fattening than Cabernet Sauvignon.
After that we had a very lovely afternoon. It is so splendid to spend time with other old people and to see the threads that led from them being the teenager that I remember, to being the charming and witty about-to-be-pensioner that they are now. They are sixty, just like me, and formed by the same long-ago sausage factory. I was very sorry when they had to go and we had to get ready for work. I could have loafed around chattering for the whole night.
I heard an amusing story yesterday which I must just tell you before I go. Long-term readers might remember the occasional presence on these pages of Son of Oligarch, Oliver’s friend at prep school. As it happens he is studying rocket-building and robot making with another of Oliver’s friends, this one from Gordonstoun, and it appears that the security services have become anxious about his rocket-manufacture and Russian antecedents and put him on a terrorist watch list. Son of Oligarch now answers every query about ‘what have you been up to?’ with the cryptic answer: ‘Watch the six o’clock news tomorrow and you’ll find out.’
This made me laugh very much.
