We were woken up ridiculously early by a stupid incontinent dog who couldn’t possibly wait for a reasonable time of day to go outside and visit the back garden.
In consequence of this we yawned our way through coffee and breakfast and all of the usual Saturday things like washing up breakfast pots and getting everything ready to go to work.
Mark had to go out anyway, because he had promised to go over to the farm to help his sister.
She has inexplicably, to my mind, bought a church pew, and wanted some help loading and unloading it.
In its favour it is a pew taken from the church in which she was married. Not in its favour is the fact that it is a nine-foot-long solid oak pew.
I think if I were to look for a souvenir from the church in which I got married I might consider a hymn book, perhaps.
If I were looking to purchase furniture on which several people could sit at once my mind would not immediately leap to the conclusion that a church pew would be the very thing. Sofas, preferably large and squashy, and even more preferably, on which I could tilt back or curl up, would be the first type of furnishing I would consider, followed closely by other sofas. Church pews would not figure in my mental catalogue at all.
Mark’s sister has a rustic farmhouse of which she is very fond, and considers that she has a responsibility to the world to preserve our archaic rural heritage for the benefit of future generations.
My experience of the future generations who share our house is that they would be unlikely to thank me for purchasing a church pew for them to sit on, or indeed for purchasing any kind of rural heritage at all.
I own, as regular readers will know very well, an historic china teapot, and follow the ancient tradition of drinking my cups of tea with a saucer. The future generation could not be less interested, and indeed are not allowed to touch their heritage at all due to my suspicion that it will become chipped, cracked or entirely shattered whilst in their less than adoring care.
Despite this, Mark’s sister is very pleased with her pew and was very grateful to Mark for his assistance.
I did not go and help to manhandle antique pews in and out of farm trailers. I thought I might write some more of my book, but having attempted this project for several minutes and failed utterly, I went back to bed instead.
This turned out to be exactly the right thing to do with the day.
I went instantly to sleep and stayed that way for several hours. When the alarm went off I was surprised to discover that Mark and the dogs had arrived back in the meantime, and were all occupying the space alongside me, the dogs on the floor, obviously, and all of them were snoring robustly.
We made a large flask of tea and rushed off to the taxi rank, without any great deal of optimism, it must be said, because January is not an optimum time for making buckets of cash in a holiday resort.
In the end it turned out to be splendid. I finished Chapter Twelve and am now halfway through Chapter thirteen, and when I eventually run out of imagination I have got an excellent book to read about a retired football hooligan who gave up a life of rascally behaviour to become a barrister. We have finished our flask of tea and eaten sausage rolls and flapjack, and are feeling contented with the world.
I have attached a picture of Number Two Daughter, who is still feeling very pleased with herself about passing her exams, and who is now thoroughly certified. The children are in the middle of a lot of examinations at the moment. I had an email from Lucy telling me that she entirely expected to fail all of her GCSE mock exams and that I might as well give up hope now, and one from Oliver telling me that he wasn’t worried about his exams because they are really for testing teachers, a sort of proxy achievement measure.
Since my own days of exams are over I have in any case left the worrying to them, there being little point in worrying about somebody else’s exam results. I will just deal with the consequences, whatever they might turn out to be.
We seem to have got off to a good start.
