I have done the hoovering.
I have not done it especially thoroughly, and the dusting could best have been described as a cursory wipe, I completely failed to manage the thorough polishing required to produce the deep shine beloved of conscientious housewives, but I have done it and my conscience is clear.
It was very much on the last minute, because unsurprisingly, once again, the day had got away from me.
Of course you will remember that yesterday the builders very kindly left me a massive stack of firewood, the demolished entrails of an ancient roof, by the look of it. I occupied the closing hours of yesterday, actually the opening hours of today if I am to be strictly truthful, wearily dragging it all into the yard and stacking it under cover, and trying to feel grateful. Then today it had got to be sawn into stove-sized lengths.
It was not my first job of the day. The day started, as days usually do, with the jog-trot over the fells with the dogs, rushed because of the length of the job-list waiting at home, and after that I had to take a wallet to the post office, thoughtlessly abandoned on the back seat by a customer who had forgotten all about it in his contented state of intoxication.
I wanted to get the firewood cut before changing out of my boots and shorts, and so I did that next.
It took a long time.
It will make brilliant firewood. There were a few ancient oak beams, a bit woodwormy in some places, and a bit crumbly in others, and a stack of other stuff which might have been ash, all dotted here and there with what appeared to be the Victorian version of screws. I couldn’t get any of those out, the carpenter who had put them there had intended them to spend the rest of eternity there, and he had done a jolly good job. I will have to fish them out of the grate with a taxi roof-sign magnet afterwards.
By the time I had finished there was a very respectable woodpile and a lot of sawdust, which I swept up. I saved some sawdust because it is brilliant for cleaning out oily pans, but I don’t cook very often when Mark is not at home, so most of it went in the dustbin. Probably I will regret that next week.
I actually felt grateful by then, because it is very nice not to feel worried about firewood. The builders have given us the magnificent gift of another week’s free hot water and heating, how very splendid it is to be us.
It was three in the afternoon by then, and I was ravenous. I dumped my boots in the hearth next to the newly stacked firewood beside the stove, and shoved my morning porridge in the microwave whilst I swept the sawdust off the kitchen floor.
I should have investigated insurance websites whilst I ate it, but I am ashamed to say, I didn’t. I read my book instead, which, incidentally, is an interesting tome detailing the history of television. I have been greatly entertained, in a nostalgic sort of way, by the bits up to about 1980, which was more or less when I stopped having television. Everything after that has become a bit incomprehensible and mysterious, going on and on about programmes I have never seen. The last time I had real television, the sort with channels, in between programmes there was a picture of the world going round. There was no Breakfast Television, Hilda Ogden was living on Coronation Street, and Bruce Forsyth was still presenting the Generation Game. It always makes me a bit uneasy if I see television now, because it really isn’t like that any more, and I have been completely gripped to read about how the changes have happened.
I still don’t think I want television anyway, Morecambe and Wise aren’t on it any more so there doesn’t seem much point, but it is nice to read about it.
After that there was a flurry of getting dinners organised before Oliver went off to work, and then I dashed upstairs for the hoovering and dusting, interrupted briefly by being called out to do a taxi run because every other taxi in Windermere was stuck at the traffic lights on the Ambleside road.
The customer had called so many taxi companies that his phone had gone flat. He had neither cash nor a card, and we had to wait several minutes at the ATM that works with telephones whilst he charged his phone on my charger and I chewed his ear about organising his life better in future.
He was very contrite, and I should jolly well think so, what a muppet.
I was late for work, but I explained to myself that it was because of rushing out to take the muppet instead of getting on with the hoovering.
It is done now.
I am a virtuous housewife.
