Still stuck I’m afraid, despite the passage of two whole days since last I wrote in these pages.
I laid my keyboard down on Friday feeling quietly confident that before I picked it up again, change should be beginning to whisper in the air. Guffy would have produced half a dozen wriggling kittens, the car would be fixed and Mark would once again be packing his offshore bags.
I am here now, and can report none of the above. None at all.
The telephone has not even dinged. Guffy is not even waddling around any more. She is merely lying underneath the sofa, looking like a furry snake that has misfortunately swallowed a buffalo.
She is not very happy with her life at the moment, and I am not in the least surprised.
I am not happy with her life either, because the excessive pressure on all of her bodily organs has caused a shocking resurgence of her poo problem, and it is squirting out of her like a very revolting Mr. Whippy Ice Cream every time she flops down. Not only are we not making much progress into our exciting future, I am occupying the enforced interval with a very lot of cleaning up.
As you know, somebody came to look at the house on Saturday. I did not meet him because of being out with Oliver and the dogs, but Mark was faffing about with the engine in the back yard, and said that he was not especially interested in asking any curious questions, so probably he didn’t care all that much. The estate agent told us afterward that he was going to see a further seven houses as well as ours, so at the very best it is a one in eight chance, and frankly I don’t think it was that much, because Mark said he was only interested in parking spaces, which are at something of a premium in Windermere.
Not to worry. There will be others.
The happy result of having somebody come to look at the house was that it was beautifully tidy when he had gone, and I ambled around it quite contentedly for the rest of the day.
Actually that isn’t true. When he had gone and I had faffed about organising dinners for a while, we were suddenly so completely exhausted that we went back to bed, where we slept a profound sleep until the dreadful shrieks of the alarm summoned us to work.
They summoned me to work. Mark went back to rebuilding my engine.
Hence I am still at work in his taxi, which is a difficult experience. I will not go into details because of course you have heard it all before, but everything is in the wrong place and there are no places for all of my things. I keep reaching up to the shelf above the windscreen and bashing my knuckles on the roof because of course I have left the shelf in my own taxi.
It is a wearisome activity.
However, there was a happy hour or two this afternoon.
Oliver and Mark had gone off to the farm to cut firewood. They had even taken the dogs, and so I was left to my own devices for a while.
I went up to the attic and got on with sewing the camper van curtains.
It is so long since I have touched this project that I had forgotten where I had stopped, and it took me ages to work it all out, but once I remembered I started again, and everything went swimmingly.
It was an absolute joy to be doing something that was not either cleaning or cooking.
Also the new cutting table that Mark has built for me has turned out to be a truly magnificent invention. The legs dropped down into place and I unrolled the fabric with ease, cutting beautifully straight cuts for practically the first time in the last twenty years.
I could hear myself sighing with happiness. It made the job wonderfully, remarkably straightforward, and I could have carried on cutting and pinning for the whole of the night.
Of course I couldn’t really, and once again I am on the taxi rank.
I am hoping very much that some more sewing time will happen tomorrow.
I have got something to look forward to.
Perhaps I am not as stuck as all that after all.
