Dearie me, I almost forgot to write to you tonight.
Despite our ongoing cash crisis we have taken a night off.
We thought we would probably be able to manage without the twenty quid we earned between us last Monday, and we are completely enmeshed in the cleaning.
It is a very belated spring clean, because I didn’t bother last spring. The house has not had a really thorough scrub since the springtime before the last one, when regular readers might recall that I cleaned so thoroughly I scrubbed my fingerprints off and couldn’t use the fingerprint identification on my computer.
It is not getting a very thorough clean now either.
We are doing the downstairs, but frankly we are not that interested in the rest of it. I do not have the smallest intention of moving the bedding box under the window in our bedroom and removing the black mould and cobwebs that I know to be festering there.
We are cleaning downstairs for wedding reasons. No admittance except on Party Business.
We spent all morning cutting back the massive foliage in the conservatory. It is only a very few weeks since Oliver and I did this, but our herbaceous companions are determined, and once again we can hardly get in through the door.
We have not finished yet.
Part of this activity was so that we could reorganise the conservatory so that Guffy and the kittens could live in there. The kittens are getting increasingly adventurous, and I confess that I am utterly sick of finding cat accidents all over the place, and so they have been banished to the conservatory.
We left the cat flap open today, and Guffy promptly disappeared. She did not come back for the entire day, until I went into the alley and yelled for her tonight, when she ambled back into the yard, mewing grumpily. She had been asleep in next door’s shed, presumably getting some kitten-free peace and quiet.
She won’t use the cat flap unless we prop it open with a stick. She does not like doing the cat thing of pushing against it with her head, so if she is to be Wild and Free we have got to put up with the draught.
We have turned on the heating and moved them all into there now. I am feeling mildly guilty, how very sad to be shut out of the happy home, but not guilty enough to let them in. It will be absolutely wonderful to get up tomorrow morning and not have to walk gingerly in case of revolting liquid cat accidents in surprise places.
After that we rushed over to Elspeth’s to cut some wood, because Mark is going to build an archway for Lucy and Jack’s wedding. They are going to stand underneath it and promise one another all the things you promise when you get married. I am embarrassed to say that I have forgotten what they actually are. I know the vicar read a long list of things that we were promising one another, but they have all disappeared out of my head now, perhaps I should look it up and see if I have managed to keep any of them. I suppose even if I haven’t Mark can’t mind all that much, it was a awfully long time ago.
We loaded Mark’s taxi with bits of tree, which, incidentally, completely ruined its wonderfully clean and fresh-scented state, and brought it all back here to clutter up the yard. We did not have time for arch-building today, Mark is going to have to do that when he gets back from his trip to Aberdeen.
He is going tomorrow.
I am going to go. I meant to tell you all sorts of things, like that we have almost finished cleaning the living room, and that we stopped for a whole hour but instead of doing sensible things we collapsed on the sofa and drank gin and ate a lot of chocolate.
The cleaning somehow seemed less onerous afterwards.
Mark has just come out of the shower. I am going to go to bed.
Have a picture of some wriggling things.
