We did clean.
We did all sorts of cleaning.
I scrubbed all of the fingerprints off the bannisters and replaced a handful of light bulbs that had given up the ghost. I was pleased with myself about this, lightbulb replacement definitely being one of those jobs with a gender orientation in my opinion. It is best left to engineers, or at least to those who are a foot taller than I am, both of which mean Mark.
Mark was not here so I did it myself, bravely.
I also scrubbed the green slimy stuff off the wall in front of the underground living room window. This grows back regularly, being underground, but gives the room an air of being a subterranean jail rather than a trim little hobbit hole, which latter is, of course, a rather more desirable impression to convey to an estate agent.
The estate agent, as you know, is coming tomorrow afternoon, and I had been looking around rather bleakly, suddenly noticing the intricate nests of cobwebs that seem to have fluffed out in every corner. I don’t suppose a house with spiders is worth very much less than one without, but when we were looking at houses on the mighty Internet we liked the look of the ones without grime and black mould everywhere far more than we liked the ones like ours.
Oliver came to help me with the biggest of the afternoon jobs, which was to smarten up the conservatory.
It has been inhabited by four dogs, a leaky cat and several enormous spiders for the entire summer. Worse, it seemed to have become something of a tourist honeypot for fungus, and the flower bed had sprouted enough shaggy parasol mushrooms to provide seating for a positive amphitheatre of fairies.
The latter were shedding powdery spores all over the place. Rather regretfully, because I think they are beautiful and they smelled mushroomy and lovely, we pulled them up.
I felt very sorry for them, all that effort sprouting up their lovely dome heads and then opening so splendidly, just like real parasols that might be carried at Ascot by somebody who thought that brown and hairy was a good look for a sunny day, but their spores were getting in the cat food and they do not look lovely for an estate agent, so they had to go.
After that Oliver very kindly climbed outside to clean the windows for me. This was very brave, because it is a perilous undertaking, involving standing in a large plant pot balanced on a couple of rotting planks over the top of the fifty gallon tank of roof water that we use for watering things in the unlikely event that it is not raining.
Fortunately no calamity befell him, and I cleaned the insides whilst he got on with it.
This had quite a startling effect. I had stopped noticing that we could not really see out of the windows any more, and the room was suddenly flooded with cheery daylight.
The biggest and most daunting task was to cut back the plants in the flower bed so that we could see the windows at all.
We could not clean the windows behind the flower bed because of the jungle, so we opened them to clean them from the outside, at which point all of the foliage burst out as well.
We had got to trim it back.
This was horrible. I do not at all like cutting back plants, and Oliver made it worse by pretending to squeal in pain every time we cut a leaf off, and then falling about laughing.
The Swiss cheese plants are truly massive. I have stopped counting the fruits on them. There are more than a dozen. There were figs on the fig tree as well.
We had got to be ruthless. It is no good just telling an estate agent that you have got a window. She will want to see it.
We did not cut all of the leaves down. I objected when it came to some of the younger and more spectacular ones, the ones more than two feet across, and in the end we tied the trunk back against the arches.
It was a seriously heavy trunk and took a lot of shoving.
It looked splendid when we had finished, bright and airy and we could walk straight from the back door to the kitchen without having to duck at all.
The house in the picture is not our house. It is the one we think we would like to buy.
We spoke to the estate agent today.
All we have got to do is sell our own house.
