We have made a household decision not to go to work for the football match tonight.
I am going to work until about one, as usual on a Sunday, and Oliver, who was only offered the choice of working from ten until half past three in the morning, is not going to bother at all.
This is because we do not have a great deal of confidence in our national football team’s ability to defeat the Mexicans, especially after they have spent last night listening to the Mexican fans having a discotheque in the road outside their hotel, and suspect that all of our customers will be bad-tempered in consequence.
Also I think that the only customers will be local anyway and I do not especially wish to waste half of the night waiting for work which turns out to be half a dozen trips of less than five minutes, carrying cross drunk people.
Hence we are not going to make the effort, which may be unpatriotic but I don’t care. Since we are not allowed to fly our national flag all over the place in case unpatriotic people get upset, lack of patriotism is obviously something of a virtue in our Brave New World, and probably I ought to feel very pleased with myself.
I don’t, though, just a bit sorry that the game is at such a dreadfully unsociable hour.
I have, of course, worked during the rest of the weekend, which has been moderately uneventful, and in between I have continued with my general house-cleaning occupations, because Mark comes home tomorrow.
I have scrubbed and polished the whole of the living room, and the dogs are not allowed in it at all any more, even more so since my cleaning activities led me to the discovery that Tonka had been sick in one of the armchairs.
I am ceasing to be a dog-lover.
The activity was made far more exciting by the arrival of the new wine rack, which I have assembled and which is now standing proudly in the corner of the living room, filled with heartburn-inducing splendour.
Telling you that I assembled it does not do justice to the hour of confused fumbling that it actually was.
I am, as you might recall, an utter incompetent when it comes to anything of a practical nature at all. I enjoy doing these things very much, but they are inevitably occasions when my own stupidity is demonstrated in its absolutely fullest glory.
I prepared as well as I could. I put my glasses on and put a battery in the electric screwdriver, which it turned out I didn’t need because it was all put together with an Allen key.
There were two pieces which had to be made up and then bolted one on top of the other. Each piece had two end bits and eight cross-pieces, four for each side.
The first mistake was attaching the two ends so that one was the wrong way round, forming a sort of Z shape instead of a wine-rack shaped rectangle. I do not know how I did this. I had been aware that there was a danger that I would, and tried to be very careful. When I finished turning the screw it was instantly obvious that I had done it anyway.
Then I put the cross-pieces in, which had both screws and little wooden dowels. I had to be careful with them as well, because once I had screwed one cross piece in tightly, none of the others would go in at all, and some disassembling had to go on.
That was all right until I discovered that I had made one piece with all of the neck ends, and the other piece with all of the bottle ends, and had to take them all apart and start again.
Then I couldn’t get the top to fit on.
It went on in the end, but I had my tongue sticking out.
There was a screw left over, but fortunately it was bent anyway, so I just put it in the bin.
I was very pleased indeed with the result, it was All My Own Work.
Have a picture.
