Suck it up

We have had such an excitement.

By excitement, obviously I mean by our standards of excitement. I am thrilled to my core, but you might not be.

You have been warned.

You will remember that yesterday our hoover stopped working, and we went to work with the resolution of earning enough to go to Asda and buy a new one when we finished.

We did not do this.

Instead, during the evening, we looked on Amazon at hoovers and discovered to our astonishment that somebody has invented a special hoover that you don’t need to push about.

It is a little round disc thing. You put it on the floor and leave it, and it wanders about all day hoovering all by itself.

We couldn’t quite believe this and investigated such a claim fairly thoroughly, but indeed it seems to be true. It even knows when its battery is running low, and it trundles off back to its charging point and plugs itself in.

Everybody who had got one said that they were brilliant. they tootle about under beds and around furniture, and they know where the stairs are so they don’t fall down, and apart from one chap who complained that his seemed to be trying to do indecent things to his DVD player all the time, everybody seemed to think they were ace.

I do not like hoovering.

Obviously we were going to have one.

This was not as reckless as it sounded as they weren’t really that much more expensive than an ordinary hoover, the only problem being that really we thought we needed an ordinary hoover as well. This was because a robot hoover will not clean either the stairs, of which we have three sets, or the taxis.

In the end Mark said that he had got a hoover at his workshop that he uses for cleaning cars. He found it in a skip with a broken motor and mended it, so it hadn’t cost us anything at all. He said that he would bring that for the house and we could have both.

We stayed at work until two in the morning but didn’t earn enough for a hoover.

We thought that maybe it wouldn’t really matter and we would just buy one on Amazon and pay the money back into the overdraft after the weekend.

We bought one.

When we got up this morning Mark went off to the farm for the old hoover and I rushed round to the bank to put our takings into the overdraft. I told my friend behind the counter all about the exciting hoover, which she thought sounded splendid, and we discussed reckless behaviour and being overdrawn. She kindly pointed out that I wasn’t just overdrawn because of being reckless, and that the transaction before the hoover purchase was marked with the reference ‘love from Mum xx’. This made me feel better.

When I got home Mark had brought his skip-hoover, and we had a day of spring-cleaning.

Everywhere was horrid, really dusty, and Mark said that he thought our old hoover had not been working properly for some time, and had been blowing all of the fine dust straight back out again. We thought this was very likely because there was a lot of dust.

He repainted the bathroom ceiling. This was very grubby indeed, not only because of the dust, but because we always shower by candle-light, and it makes everywhere sooty. We have given this practice serious consideration, because we don’t like painting ceilings and scrubbing tiles, but decided in the end that we still like the candles so much that it is worth it.

I took the living room curtains down and washed them. This was hard work because they are massive, thick fabric with blackout lining and cover the whole of the end wall. There are four of them and I can only manage to lift one at a time.

I washed the towels and the shower curtain and the lovely cloth that Number One Daughter brought back from her military adventures in Afghanistan. I dusted and wiped and polished and finally I tried out Mark’s skip-hoover.

It was brilliant. Really brilliant. It turned out to be a sort of hoover called a Dyson, which is fantastically good at picking up dust. The carpets suddenly looked brightly coloured again, and everywhere started to smell lovely.

Everywhere looked ace, and we both stood back and admired the clean carpets and the beautiful creamy painted ceiling.

I could not be more pleased.

After our dusty old hoover we have now got a miraculously good hoover that will really suck up the dog hairs, and after tomorrow we will have one that hoovers all by itself as well.

We have such an exciting life.

I bet I won’t sleep tonight.

The picture is the first of the curtains drying on the line.