Mark took Oliver and the guns and the dogs and buzzed off to the farm this morning.
Of course I love them very much but I was very pleased to see the back of them, and also of their enormous cluttery boots and hats.
I was left at home with Lucy, who was entirely absorbed with her own activities in her room, which seemed to involve Mandarin prep and watching anime films and writing her novel and trying out mascara, but not talking to me or being underfoot, so the day was blissfully unoccupied.
I like solitary.
I had already missed Womens’ Hour by the time I finally persuaded them to depart, laden with emergency snacks: but there was an exciting programme about borrowing money from your family, which was inspiring, and I unearthed the large rotary iron and made all the sheets and duvet covers flat and satisfyingly smooth whilst I listened.
Of course I know that a person can sleep every bit as well in sheets that are a tiny bit crumpled. I do it for that blissful bed-time moment when I am fresh from the shower, warm and slightly dampish in the corners. That is the perfect moment to light an English Fern candle and slide between gloriously crisp, smooth, white cotton sheets, scented and perfect.
This is one of my favourite moments, and well worth the few minutes it takes to shove the sheets through the ironing machine. I do the children’s as well, although suspect they don’t appreciate it as much or, even, certainly in Oliver’s case, actually notice. Mark notices, although has got to be discouraged from unspeakable activities that might spoil the pristine perfection of the moment as he fails to appreciate the sanctity of clean sheetyness and crumpled and sticky is just fine with him.
I made the sheets nice and flat, and then I made a lot of clothes nice and flat, and then put them all away virtuously in everybody’s drawers. This is always the hardest bit of ironing, and the bit which catches me out most often. It is all too easy to convert the scrumpled rags into unsullied smooth folds and then spoil it all by leaving them in a tidy pile on the bottom of the stairs to be carried up by the next person to pass them.
Of course the next person to pass them is not even remotely likely to appreciate that they are expected to be helpful in this fashion, and very probably nobody will actually register that there is a carefully placed and beautifully folded stack of clothes creating a small obstacle at the foot of the stairs.
What happens next is that all of us, but mostly Mark, the children and the dogs, barge past the pile several times, knocking it over and sometimes tritely shunting it into an approximation of its former self, and when eventually I come to the pile itself it is a mere memory of its one-time glory. Rags to rags in a single tiresome afternoon.
However that was not the case today as my housewifely virtue was turned to the Fully On position, and I put everything away in the drawers and then came downstairs to make an economical casserole with the leftover chicken which I boiled up for stock and then sieved, and with the remains of the vegetables. I could hardly believe my own perfect marvellousness. When Mark and Oliver came home the house was filled with nice cooking smells and the faint lavender scent of clean linen, and I knew my place in Heaven had been dusted down afresh.
I spoiled it all later on by being too exhausted to bother going to work and collapsing in a heap in front of our long-awaited DVD which we have been slowly working our way through for months, it is called A Game Of Thrones and it is a sort of soap opera about an imaginary country. We love it although it is not much like the books, and every now and again one of us will squeak indignantly when something is especially different.
We watched three episodes, ate lots of chocolate and got drunk.
Apart from that I am a perfect housewife.
