Mark finished laying the kitchen floor last night, Oliver arrived home in time to be able to walk across it without peril, and we did, as promised, paint ourselves backwards to the stairs before we went to bed.
The poor dogs and Guffy were banished to the conservatory.
We were not pleased to discover, on awakening this morning, that the sealant with which we had so carefully besmeared all of the new cork tiles had not dried properly, and was still tacky.
The tin said it would take between four and six hours, which was obviously a fib, because it has still not dried properly even now, and it was last night, almost twenty hours ago.
The bit Mark did is even stickier than the bit I did, because he was more lavish with the sealant.
We considered this when we got up, because we now had several newly cleaned, freshly enfluffied carpets and one very stickily cork-tiled floor.
Obviously we did not wish to combine the two.
Mark covered a bit of the floor with a sheet of plastic, and we have spent the rest of the day leaping from the stairs to the fireplace to the plastic and not wearing socks.
The poor dogs are still imprisoned in the conservatory. They are beginning to be a bit forlorn about this, as if they have committed some offence for which the penalty is a lonely exile. We keep trying to tell them that they haven’t, but the problem is that they imagine every act of kindness means that they have been forgiven for their not-quite-understood offence, and immediately try to charge back into the kitchen again.
We really do not want dog hair glued all over the new floor, nor the new floor firmly glued all over the dogs. They will just have to stay where they are for the moment.
I hope it dries by tomorrow.
In the meantime Mark, assisted by Oliver, has been constructing the arch underneath which Lucy and Jack will be tying the knot on Tuesday, and it is going to look splendid. We have still got to decorate it, but that can wait until Sunday. In the meantime it has been removed to next door’s back yard, because it is too large to fit in to ours, and fortunately there is nobody on holiday there at the moment.
Nobody is going to be there until our wedding guests show up on Monday. We have been able to book the two houses next door to us, which turned out to be a rather unexpected advantage of living in a tourist-filled village and having endlessly rotating neighbours. Their gate blew off during the last set of storms, and Oliver has sawn it up for us to burn along with the floorboards.
I did not help with the arch construction and gate-dismemberment. I stayed in the kitchen and cooked things, because we are expecting a lot of people to drop in, and I expect they will all like tea and biscuits.
We went to the cash and carry across the road, and purchased ninety sausages and a couple of colossal packs of bacon, because Number One Son-In-Law will eat them even if everybody else coming to the wedding decides to be vegetarians.
I will have a Number Two Son-In-Law after Tuesday, that is a startling thought.
I have wrapped the bacon around the sausages and cooked them, so that when it comes to breakfasts we can just do a quick head-count and chuck them in the oven to brown off. I have experience of large family gatherings, and the experience suggests that you need to start with a very, very full fridge.
I am going to make some cheese and onion pies tomorrow.
If the floor has dried then I can put the furniture back.
After that we can start decorating the arch.
No admittance except on Party Business.
