We have been shopping and now we have got minus money again.
I don’t care in the least, it has been brilliant. We went to the kindly glass man to collect the beautiful new window for the front of the camper van, and the two mirrors which he had cut to just the right size for us to go inside it: one for the bathroom and one for the wardrobe door, they are made of special toughened mirror and are perfect.
We had some interesting challenges when it came to loading it all into the back of the taxi to take back, because both the window and one of the mirrors were really long: but by a great stroke of good fortune, next door to the glass man there was a man selling cut off bits of carpets. We went in for a look, and he was so friendly that we bought enough carpet and underlay to recarpet the whole van as well as lots of glue for sticking the lino to the walls. The whole lot only cost us thirty pounds, which we thought was ace.
We took it all back to the glass man and packed it carefully around the glass things, which worked perfectly, because we managed to get them back to the farm around all the bumpy little roads without even the tiniest crack, so it was a brilliant inspiration in lots of ways.
It is lovely carpet, a sort of smoky grey colour, and really soft, it is going to be gorgeous on the floor. I am not going to allow the dogs anywhere near it at all, because I don’t think I would find it easy to be generous enough to forgive an accidental leak. They are going to have to run after us or ride on the roof, or be issued with corks. Of course it is carpet, and I know it is not going to stay pristine for very long, but we might as well do everything we can to improve the odds a bit.
After that we bought a new tap to go on the kitchen sink and then went to Asda for the things I had forgotten in Booths yesterday, so now everything is all right and we have got sausages and apple juice and coffee for the weekend.
This doesn’t sound like a very important thing, but a happy weekend is helped along very much by lots of little not important things, and if I forget too many of them then it turns into a rubbish weekend.
Also we had a nice time just being out together. We had another look at the camper van shop on the way home. It is great good fortune to have a camper van shop so near our house, it is so lovely to go and look at other people’s ideas and feel inspired, although none of the vans in there look like ours at all. None of them seem to have stick-on rose patterned vinyl all over the walls or carved wooden sinks with a little heart in the corner so that I can remember that my husband loves me and also have somewhere to put the dishcloth.
It all seems to be taking a terribly long time, and I must own up that at times I have been getting awfully twitchy with longing to have a holiday.
It is only when we go away together that we truly get time together with the children, without dashing in and out of work and groaning and drinking coffee all the time. Of course Lucy works as well, and Oliver goes off having his boy-life with Harry, and at home we hardly see one another. We have absolutely promised faithfully that we will all have a few days in Blackpool before the end of the summer, and we will do even if we have got to take a tent.
We took the window back to the farm and Mark got on with re-plumbing the fridge and I started cleaning all of the old silicone off the window ready to put it back. I haven’t finished yet, because there is lots of it and I had got to go to work, but it is an enormously satisfying job, like picking sunburn.
We will just carry on carrying on with it…
