I am very pleased to say that against all of our expectations, Guffy is doing very well indeed.
She is not lying about moping, or at any rate, no more than usual. She is sleeping a very great deal, but since she is a cat this is hardly a surprise, and she seems to be bright, attentive, and apart from her usual ghastly poo problem, is perfectly fine.
The dreadfulness of the other day, when I thought she had sloped off to die, has not been lost on me. I think we are going to have to try very hard to keep her in a state of not being dead. It is very inconvenient to have splashes of cat guff all over the place, but I suppose that really it is nothing that can’t be resolved with a mop and some bleach, and she is enjoying her life very much.
She almost chased a young pigeon yesterday. It was plodding round and round the back yard. Guffy hid behind the wood pile and watched it, but decided not to bother since it was easily as big as she is, and occasionally made alarming flappy bounces.
I was glad about this. I like the pigeons, which make a gloriously soporific bubbling noise. My grandmother’s next door neighbour kept pigeons, and she hated them, because of hanging washing in the garden, but I did not do the washing when I was six, and was at liberty to like them as much as I wanted, so I did.
The excitement of the day today has not been Mark’s trip to Milnthorpe to purchase a new car, although that is what he has been doing. I think this is rather dull. It has meant a massive outlay of cash that I would have greatly preferred to spend on more interesting things, and is going to involve a very lot of paperwork and faffing about with the council.
For the interested, although I do not suppose that there are very many of you, it is a Skoda Octavia, and it is black.
It was a necessary purchase because Mark’s car has been slowly sinking into a smoky decline and the bits to fix it would have cost more than a thousand pounds. Also the council are having an organisation failure, and there is absolutely no guarantee that they will have resolved it and decided upon their licensing activities by the time it is due to be re-licensed as a taxi. It is far too boring to think about, never mind explain, but in a nutshell there is no point in spending a fortune on a car that might have to be scrapped by Christmas anyway.
Hence we have bitten the bullet, which exploded with bank-account stripping force, and purchased a new one.
This was the dull bit of the day.
The exciting bit was completely different.
The exciting bit has been fluttering around in the background to our lives for a week or so now, and we have finally decided what to do about it.
We are going to Glyndebourne in a week or two and will be having a picnic.
This has got to be an upmarket picnic, with cut crystal and china and a linen tablecloth.
We like the sound of this very much.
Hence we have been contemplating picnics. We do not need to bring a picnic basket this time, because our friends, who live much closer, are going to bring one, but we have decided that our current picnic arrangement, being a rather dilapidated bag with plastic plates, is hopelessly outclassed. There will be other picnics, we thought, and we would like a properly middle-class picnic basket
This morning we looked at hampers on the Fortnum and Mason website whilst we were having our coffee.
They ranged in price from about four hundred quid to well over a thousand.
We inspected the latter with great interest, and discussed them in minute detail. They were lovely, we decided, but not good enough. We wanted to be able to keep food both hot and cold, we wanted to be able to have ice cream and chilled champagne, hot sausage rolls and fresh bread rolls dipped in oil.
The baskets thus depicted, even the most thrillingly expensive, just did not fulfil those criteria.
You might not be at all astonished to hear that eventually we decided that we would make our own.
A couple of hours of traversing eBay later we were the owners of some elderly and empty picnic baskets and pages and pages of designs, and we are so excited about making them that we can hardly think about anything else.
We have built a mock-up out of cardboard and have been trying our china and cut crystal glasses for size. This kept us so busy that we were entirely frustrated when we had to desist because of going to collect the new car.
The new baskets will not be ready in time for Glyndebourne, but they will be a very happy project for the next few months in between welding bits on to the camper van.
I will keep you informed.
