We have had a real day off, a real one, without going to work at all in any part of it.
We are going to have another one tomorrow.
This is really exciting, and I am enjoying it very much.
What we have done with it was to go and work on the camper van.
We meant to have an entire day working on the camper van, but we couldn’t, because of working late last night and eventually not actually waking up until almost eleven o’clock this morning, which did not make for a terribly productive day, especially not once we had faffed about with the Clean Sheets.
Also I was still tied in knots with the barrister’s letter and the telephone company. All I had to do was to copy and paste his very clever document into my email and send it, but that proved to be entirely beyond my capabilities. It would not save the formatting, and I had the option of sending a ridiculously squished letter with paragraphs that started halfway through the paragraph before, or spoiling his beautifully laid out legal document be re-formatting it myself.
In the end I printed it out and posted it, which will probably do the trick, they might even take it properly seriously if it turns up in an envelope with a picture of the King on the front, that will show them I jolly well mean business.
It was eight pages long and said things like General Conditions of Entitlement, and Misrepresentation Act 1967 s.2(1), which impressed me no end, if I was them I would be jolly scared now.
Mark took the dogs around the Library Gardens whilst I was still frowning at it. Then I went to the Post Office and we hung up the sheets, and finally we could go.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon by then, but it did not matter because we were not supposed to be at work tonight. I had sent messages to all of the other taxi drivers warning them that they needed to make sure they were at work in my place, because otherwise people would start getting in Ubers, and that would be dreadful.
We dashed off to the shed, where my old taxi was sitting forlornly in front of the camper van. We had to put the jump leads to the camper, because the battery was flat, and drove it out into the yard. It is dark working in the shed, because we have not yet organised any lights in there.
It seems very dirty in the camper van now. It has been sitting about in an unoccupied state for over a year, and it has become grimy and filthy, and it is getting worse all the time, because we are making an enormous mess.
We are demolishing the entire inside so that we can start again. We got an awful lot out today, all of the back is empty now and the kitchen is gone. We spent the day quietly marvelling at our previously determined selves, everything is made out of carefully fashioned leftover bits, glued together so that nothing was wasted. It is all made out of other things, bits of old pallets and firewood mostly, and carefully, painstakingly constructed to give us the best result that we could possibly manage without actually spending any cash.
No wonder it took ages.
This time is going to be easier, because we are not paying school fees any more and so we are not nearly so penniless. We can purchase everything we need like complete plutocrats.
The whole thing is wonderfully thrilling. We have made a shocking mess, I can hardly find the words to describe it to you. Bits were rotten, some bits were rusty, other bits were open to the elements and have become filthy. There was dirt and splinters and grime everywhere, but it is coming apart, and we keep imagining the way that it will be when we have finished, probably in a couple of years.
There is an enormous amount of space in the back now that the benches and the kitchen are gone. We are going to take the bathroom out, but it has got to stay for a little while, because it is a major support for the roof. We are going to block up the windows at the back, because we are going to have the bedroom there, and fit an enormous roof light so that we will still have plenty of daylight.
It is so exciting. We are stripping away the walls and the roof, so that eventually nothing will be left but a tin shell, and then we are going to start rebuilding the walls, a bit thicker and better insulated, with all of the wiring carefully tunnelled through them, and special piped heating underneath the floor.
We came away feeling very pleased about it all. It is going to be our present to ourselves for our old age, we will have a perfectly beautiful camper van and we can travel the world if we want.
We are going to do the same tomorrow. We have talked about nothing but camper van all evening.
I am looking forward to it very much indeed.
