Mark is home, and it is absolutely splendid.
We have been luxuriating in idleness.
We did not get up for ages this morning. We loafed about in bed with coffee whilst the dogs loafed equally contentedly on the enormous towel over the bed, put there so that disgusting bits do not fall off the dogs and then adhere to our bedding.
Being allowed on the bed is one of their absolute favourite things. They were very happy indeed this morning.
We added some excitement to the loafing by booking our train tickets to go and collect our shiny new camper van next week. It is in Huntingdon, and we are going to trek down there and visit my cousins whilst we are there.
We are very excited indeed about the new camper van, not that it is a camper van yet. At the moment it might be better described as a lorry. We also have something of a difficulty about what we are going to do with the old one. The man at the scrapyard will not take it away unless we give him five hundred quid, which we are disinclined to do. He will take it if we strip out all of the walls and the ceiling so that all that is left is the aluminium shell.
Mark says that we will take it to the farm, cut the van part off, and set fire to it. He said that this will get rid of all of the timber whilst leaving the frame, which can then be collected up and loaded on to the back of the van and taken to the scrapyard.
I am just a bit horrified about that, both horrified and also satisfied. It seems like an appropriate ritual end for it, both savagely atavistic and suitably sensible, perhaps we might have a bonfire night gathering to do the actual burning. It seems both terribly sad and yet a step forward into our future.
Poor camper van.
I have not told it what we are planning, but perhaps it has guessed. It seems terribly forlorn, locked away in the dark prison of the shed, a bit like the poor experimental chimp who was taught sign language and who kept saying Key. Out. Please.
Perhaps we are rotters really.
I am trying not to think about it.
When we got up I took the dogs off over the fell whilst Mark buzzed off to collect some things from the shed. He does not have to go to work again until the end of November, which seems like such a fantastically long time that I feel like a ten year old at the beginning of the school holidays, how wonderful to have such a long shirk. Of course we are driving taxis just the same as usual, and we have got a very lot of other things to get on with, but in the meantime life is going to become very easy and tranquil.
We can have coffee in bed every single day.
I made taxi picnics whilst Mark fixed my car. It did not take very long, because he has only fixed a bit of it, there are a lot of other bits that need to be done but it will go without them, and so we don’t care all that much, and he has not got round to those yet.
After that I painted some more of the Advent calendars whilst Mark sawed up some firewood, because despite my pleadings for them to stop being so generous, the builders had left us some more, we have got so much that we could probably have a bonfire in the back yard as well if only it wasn’t for the washing lines.
It is bonfire season. It is the time when you build an effigy and put it on a bonfire. Then the flames roar up in a horridly sacrificial blaze and everybody stands around and stares, feeling slightly uncomfortable. You pass your livestock through the smoke to get rid of fleas, and you bang drums and dance about yelling wildly.
It will have to wait until the first week of November because we are going to be away this weekend.
I am still trying not to think about it.
