At the time of writing I am on the taxi rank.
Mark is at home having laid half of a floor.
It is going to be an all right sort of floor, although it is cork tiles, and not as nice as the last one, which was also cork tiles, but of the rather more thoroughly wallet-emptying sort. That is to say, it is not as nice as the last one was when we actually laid it. It is a very, very lot nicer than the shocking travesty of a floor that the last one eventually became.
We do not really care because we are going to move and so we do not need to like it. It just needs to be clean and respectable and not grouted with dried up cat poo.
Mark said that if we do not move house we will simply lay a nice floor over the top of it one day.
If we do not move house it probably won’t be very long before we have to.
We are burning the old floorboards as we go, so we will not be putting them back now. They have kept the house wonderfully warm all day, so they must have dried out properly in the end.
Mark is still at home laying tiles even as I write. I would have liked to have stayed and been helpful, but we have not been at work since Sunday and we are starting to run out of cash, so economic reasoning prevailed.
I have been here for three hours now and have earned a tenner.
It might have been economic optimism actually.
In fact I have not been especially helpful all day, apart from occasionally clearing up some of the mess that he was making. Instead I have made myself scarce to the middle floor of the house where I have carried on with the carpet washing project.
I am very impressed with the magical carpet cleaner. It works by jetting a high-pressure squirt of water on to the carpet and then sucking it back up again. In the meantime you scrub the thing frantically backwards and forwards over all of the dirty bits until all of the clean water has gone and you are left with a bucket full of disgusting black hairy water.
Our carpets are woollen. The house is beginning to smell like a flock of sheep on a rainy day in August.
It is wonderful to see our carpets becoming colourful again. I had forgotten how much I loved the brilliant orange and emerald green hues of my office carpet. All of the dog grease has disappeared and beauty has been restored.
I have even gone behind the bedding box and cleaned away the mould and the cobwebs. I found some electric hair straighteners which were so thick with dust that it took me some time to work out what they were. I put them back again, nobody in our house has got hair long enough to bother straightening it. I do not know why I have got them. I do not remember ever being the sort of person who thought it was important to have straight hair, although it appears that I must have been.
Either that or they belonged to one of the children.
The plan for the evening is that when Mark has finished the floor and I have finished work, we will imprison Guffy and the dogs in the conservatory and then paint the newly tiled floor with sealant, which will make it a jolly sight easier to mop in a cat-accident emergency. We think we will paint ourselves to the bottom of the stairs and then just go up to bed, so we had better think very carefully about remembering glasses of water and telephones, etc.
The minor flaw in that plan is that Oliver and Emily are currently on the long journey of driving home from Bath. They will arrive some time after midnight and will need to get in to the house somehow.
They might be obliged to climb in through the window.
