You will not be surprised to hear that I have washed all of my sheets all over again, despite it not being Monday.
This, as you know, was because of Guffy’s squirty misfortune as she bounded across my bed yesterday.
I scrubbed it all off as well as I could before I went to work last night, and soaked it in disinfectant. This presumably neutralised any malevolent microbes which might have been lurking therein, but left my bed smelling like a hospital ward in the nineteen seventies.
Not much like a hospital ward today, alas.
Hence this morning I dragged all of the sheets off the bed and stuffed them in the washing machine. The washing machine is becoming rather inefficiently elderly, and there was an alarming crashing noise as it spun, with cascades of rust dribbling out all over the floor. I had one of those ghastly moments when a six hundred pounds bill for a new washing machine flashes before your eyes, but apart from a bit of a mess and a deafening noise, it was all right in the end. That is to say, everything came out more or less clean and not especially sodden, so we will wait and see what tomorrow brings.
There was a very lot of rust on the floor, though, the conservatory looked as though the chap from the scrapyard had just emptied his hoover in there.
Once the washing was draped over the stove, the Lake District springtime being too damp for it to be released to flap freely in the great outdoors, I turned my attention to today’s task, which was The Shopping.
We have a Bank Holiday Weekend barrelling down on us as relentlessly as Casey Jones and the Cannonball Express, and I want to spend as much of it as I can at work in the taxi.
This is not because I have suddenly developed a yearning to sit on the taxi rank with the occasional opportunity to patronise idiots, but for the very prosaic reason that we need the cash.
We are going to London in a few weeks, just me and Mark, to see the ballet, and London is not cheap.
It is really not cheap. We are going to go on the train, which is roughly twice as expensive as driving, but can be guaranteed not to develop an overheating fault on the motorway, and we will not need to look for a parking space for it.
Anyway, if I am to spend hour upon tedious hour hanging about the taxi rank, trying fruitlessly to raise cash for train fares, I will not have the time to be pottering around Booths to purchase yoghurt and sausages, nor feverishly throwing together endless packed dinners, because Oliver will be working as well, and will also need to be fed.
Hence I occupied today trailing hopelessly around supermarkets, blinking at the massively increased prices and wondering how our beloved leaders can possibly tell us that inflation is below three percent, when clearly it is somewhere in the region of a hundred and fifty percent and still climbing.
The lady Chancellor has tried to persuade the supermarkets to sell bread for less than it costs them to make it, in return for her relaxing some of the more pointless and expensive supermarket-related rules. I understand that the supermarkets are resisting this valiant suggestion, and have recommended that if the said rules are not strictly necessary, perhaps they could be relaxed anyway, thus making everything a bit cheaper.
Obviously she won’t do that. Governments like rules.
Anyway, I am not good at shopping at the best of times, and today was most certainly not the best of times. I staggered around grimly, manoeuvring a recalcitrant trolley, the sort which has been programmed to swerve to the left under all possible circumstances, like the sort of AI that the BBC approves of. I had a budget, to which I failed to adhere, and a shopping list, which was wildly over-optimistic, and a headache by the time I had finished.
I bought some cat food which promised to bung up the insides of leaky cats, and which I thought sounded optimistic, and lots of things which I am going to cook tomorrow. We will have full shelves in time for the weekend, and can simply stuff things into plastic tubs and rush off out.
I was sick of shopping by the time I had finished.
There are worse things than sitting on the taxi rank.
