I will not be at all sorry to get to Clean Sheets Day tomorrow.
We have had a misfortune.
As perhaps you know, we start the day as we would dearly like to go on, with some concentrated loafing about in bed, drinking coffee, observing the neighbours outside our bedroom window, and generally practising for the day when we are retired and the fretting and fuming bit of life is over.
We are joined in this lack of activity by the household livestock.
The dogs like this very much indeed. They are not allowed to get on the bed until it has been covered by a large towel, which I do whilst Mark is making the coffee, and not then until Mark has got back in it. They hover at the end of the bed, bouncing about and making excited little yelping noises until the moment arrives, and then leap up, collapsing instantly into blissful sleep, just as if they were Google’s Willow quantum chip.
Guffy the kitten has discovered this family activity and is determined not to be left out.
She is not nearly as peaceful a companion as the dogs.
She likes to be with us very much, partly because we are all unoccupied, and there are resting bits of everybody to be hunted and killed. The dogs have got stray tails and ears left lying about unguarded, and we have got unemployed fingers which occasionally wag about in the manner of very desirable prey.
She has hunted my hand so thoroughly, and killed it so effectively, that I am beginning to look a bit like Harry Potter did at the time when the wicked teacher made him write lines which were magically scratched into the back of his hand whilst he wrote them.
That is to say, I look a bit the way he might have done if he had been writing in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
I do not actually mind this, because the whole point of Guffy the Rodent Slayer is going to be her murderous nature, and she is showing a good deal of promise for this at the moment.
However, I am less than enthusiastic about having hands which look like a composition by one of those modern pointillist artists, being punctured in countless places by needle-sharp fangs and claws, and so yesterday morning we brought a pair of leather gloves to bed with the coffee.
Guffy did not like the gloves very much.
She regarded them with a deep mistrust, eyeing them suspiciously and backing away worriedly, occasionally making little darts towards them before retreating again, occasionally disappearing right off the edge of the bed to return a few minutes later to see if they had run off yet.
Suddenly she plucked up courage.
With two enormous bounds, easily more than a foot high, she leaped across the bed, landing first on poor Roger Poopy’s nose, and then into Mark’s coffee.
There was an enormous coffee splash, an irate dog, and a lightening-speed fleeing cat, all in the space of one exciting moment.
There was coffee everywhere, mostly all over Mark, and the wall, and the bed, and the dogs, and Mark had some exciting cat-scrabble scratches.
I laughed so much I could not help mop up.
We wiped the coffee off the wall, but the sheets and the dog towel could not be restored without hauling them off the bed and shoving the lot into the washing machine. This seemed a waste when we were so close to Clean Sheets Day, so we have left them there and resigned ourselves to a night or two of coffee-scented slumbers.
I will be very glad when tomorrow morning arrives and we can do something about it.
In other news, the camper van is coming on nicely. It has almost completely dried out now, and I have been cutting through the aluminium frame to make some more window-holes. I can hardly tell you how exciting this is. I accidentally cut a hole in the side of the van this afternoon. We are going to have to weld this shut when the new welding lenses arrive, but Mark just sighed and said resignedly that he supposed it would not be the last time.
Mark has almost finished building the bit of floor for the new steps to go in.
It is the most thrilling activity imaginable.
