It seems to have been a very busy weekend.
Of course we have had Lucy and Jack with us, and somehow every spare minute seems to have been occupied.
Oliver did not see very much of them. He was working all day looking menacing in the car park next to the lake, and then all evening looking menacing in a pub a couple of hundred yards along the banks.
It has been a sunny weekend and there were a lot of people here. He hated everybody by the time he got home this afternoon.
I sympathised enthusiastically, not being a great lover of humanity myself by this end of the weekend. Driving a taxi is an occupation guaranteed to drain anybody’s veins of the milk of human kindness.
I have not helped my general spirit of tolerant benevolence by being tired. Despite not going to bed until five, I have the tiresome sort of body clock that persists in nudging me into the waking world somewhere around ten, and somehow when all the rest of the world is already buzzing along chirpily outside the window I don’t usually manage to settle back to sleep.
This morning I got up, still yawning and rubbing gritty eyes, to find Lucy and Jack already in the yard, busily sawing up massive chunks of the builders’ firewood.
I have to say I was relieved about this. There has been so much of it this week that we simply do not have the storage capacity to fit it all in, and there was barely room to squeeze past it to get into the alley.
They spent all of yesterday afternoon in the same occupation, filling ten rubble sacks and some improvised bin liners, which did not look likely to be continuously functional all the way back home, but since Jack’s dad had very kindly volunteered to lend his van for the purpose I thought that probably they would manage. Indeed, when his dad turned up with the van, Jack arranged an exciting surprise for them all when they got home by jamming the very last bag of wood in as tightly as he could against the door, and then slamming the door quickly even as it began to teeter.
I thought as I waved them off that I was glad that my part of the firewood was over.
Jack’s dad and the van arrived just after I had come back from our dog-emptying session. Lucy and Jack had filled the yard with sawdust by then, and sawn firewood not only filled the yard, but half of the alley as well.
It was nice to see Jack’s dad, who had brought Poppy with him.
Poppy, as you might recall, is one of Rosie’s poopies. She is nine months old now, and as brainlessly delighted to be alive as adolescent poopies usually are, with an attention span reminiscent of a teenage girl in the last history lesson of the day on the afternoon before a Take That concert.
I should add that Take That is about as contemporary as I can manage when it comes to pop music. I confess that I have not been following this genre very closely, so if you are youthful please substitute a more up-to-date quartet of musical lotharios.
I don’t know if Take That was a quartet, actually, there might just have been two of them or perhaps I am thinking of Wham.
Anyway, Poppy was thrilled to be released into the company of her mother and stepfather, although I regret to tell you that the latter instantly tried to do the tiresome thing that boy dogs do to girl dogs, and had to be booted off unceremoniously, really if he was a person he would be in prison.
The dogs belted around the conservatory, barking and scuffling and rolling over and over in an excited kerfuffle of dogs, whilst we sawed and loaded firewood and occasionally drank cups of tea.
When everybody had gone I cleared up the yard.
There was a very lot of sawdust.
Fortunately it comes in very handy for cleaning pans in which oily things have been cooked, so I saved it carefully. Also you can pack it round frozen things and keep them frozen if you don’t happen to have a fridge, we once kept the back leg of a pig for almost a week like that, do add that to your collection of handy domestic trivia occasionally to be found in these pages.
I was very weary when I had finished.
I was so weary I did not bother with my usual health-giving dinner that I usually take to work.
I took a cheese sandwich and a handful of dates instead.
Probably I will be portly again by tomorrow.
