It is ten at night and I have only just got round to starting to write in these pages.
It seems to have been a very busy sort of day.
I have rushed round madly like a person expecting their mother-in-law to visit.
I have been having a clearance.
I was distracted at the very beginning by Number One Daughter, recently returned from her athletic adventures in California, calling not with stories of triumph and adventure, but to tell me that her car had been stolen.
They had parked it on the drive when they came home from the airport. and their neighbour had surprised some balaclava-attired chaps driving over the hedge with it this morning. Apparently he chased them with a machete, but they declined to stop to give him the opportunity to use it.
The police seem to have found it in the end, although it is not the car it was, and will probably not be coming home.
I made insurance-company noises and commiserated unhelpfully, suggesting that she might borrow Lucy’s old car, but when I called Lucy and Jack they explained that its MOT had expired and it was also awaiting its last scrapyard journey.
Thieves in balaclavas. I was quite horrified. The south is an exciting place to live.
Number One Daughter is resigned. She is going to be working away for the next few weeks and has decided that she will sort it all out when she gets back.
I had hoped that I might get some more curtain-sewing done, but I didn’t. A host of daily chores seemed to occupy a good deal of the day, culminating in a dash to Kendal and back to collect some more dog food. We had run out of the interesting stuff in jelly that they all like best, and I did not think I could face eight reproachful brown eyes when it came to dinner time.
I have trimmed back the bay tree and the blackcurrant bushes in the back yard. These had become so overgrown that they were stopping people from driving past, and also stopping me from strolling breezily through the yard when I come through the gate.
It is not at all the same when you have got to bash your way through marauding greenery, especially not when it is raining.
Things had become rampantly overgrown, and it took me ages. I picked the last of the blackcurrants whilst I was doing it, and chucked them in some rum to stew until Christmas, blackcurrant rum will be ace when it is laced through Prosecco.
The plants did not like being hacked back. When I had finished the yard seemed frozen into a shocked silence, as if everything was suddenly appalled by the cataclysm that had befallen on its natural wild abundance.
Space and order had been achieved, but the price was all of their young, green shoots, the ones that had been springing so enthusiastically into life and reaching hopefully towards the sun.
I dived back into the house guiltily. There is no point in telling a tree that you are sorry.
I do not think it will forgive me for a while.
I went up to the front garden, which was in blissful ignorance of my savagery.
You might recall that I have been having a clothing misfortune.
I hauled the dressmaker’s dummy out and stood it in the sunshine, peculiarly naked amid the lush greenery.
The sage bush has flowered, by the way. I did not even know that sage had flowers. I have grown it before, lots and lots of times, but this is the first time one has flowered for me.
They are rather beautiful purple flowers. I looked at them and felt rather humbled.
I did not tell it about my activities in the back yard.
Then I dug out my too-big dresses from the attic and dressed the dummy. It must be fatter than I ever was, because the dresses fitted it even more snugly than they ever fitted me.
I took photographs, trying to make it look nymph-like, despite its headless portliness.
When I had finished I downloaded the photographs and listed the lot on eBay.
I won’t make very much for them, but when I looked I had bought most of them on eBay in the first place, and didn’t pay very much anyway.
I meant to get round to parcelling them up in case somebody buys them, but I didn’t.
I will do that tomorrow.
