We are still basking in warm sunshine.
For the last week now we have been taking all washing up water and clothes-washing water and chucking it on the garden. Not the washing machine water, obviously, that would be too difficult so that just has to trickle away into the care of the Corporation.
I think this is helping to deter caterpillars as well. I have mixed feelings about caterpillar-deterrence, because they are such rapacious starving creatures and eat holes in every single leaf: but it is so lovely to have butterflies. Anyway, they don’t seem to like soapy water very much.
We have washed and re-hung every single curtain in the house whilst the weather has been so dry, which is a rather splendid feeling. Our house is very shiny and polished at the moment, it helps that we are not in it much. Every time we go out we set off our little beetle-hoover, which always seems to have a full case of dust when we get home, and I have not done any hoovering since, well, since the last time I did some.
We like the beetle-hoover very much. The adverts for them showed happy families sitting on their sofas watching the hoover instead of the television. We thought this was rubbish until we got it, and now we can see why, because watching it buzzing about is absolutely absorbing. The dogs are very suspicious indeed, and have to hide on the sofa. We have warned them that they will have to be careful, because some day it will come and get them.
We spent today at the farm again, and I heard my first cuckoo of the year. There is a woodpecker in the trees somewhere near the workshop, and any number of blackbirds and swifts and finches, and it is lovely to be painting peaceably and listening to them calling to one another.
Mark has taken the electric fan out of the engine of the donor-taxi and fitted it into the engine of the camper van, this is because the old one was both broken and was rubbish anyway. He has made it work, so that if the engine gets hot it comes on. He was very pleased about this, and so was I. He had to test it by dropping the sensor in some boiling water because the engine isn’t going yet, but it works splendidly and all is well.
I have painted lots of leaves for my tree, and added some more flowers and a ladybird, and thought that my life was being very pleasant indeed.
I explained this to Mark. If the twenty five year old me had met the fifty year old me, she would have been agonisingly jealous. In fact, she would have been completely unable to believe that anybody could have such a splendid life adventure, and would have suffered from excruciating pangs of envy.
I find that a reassuring and a peculiar thought, I hope the fifty year old me would feel the same about the seventy five year old me. I can’t see why not. There are lots of ace things left to be doing, and so far it seems to be getting better and better. I like getting old very much.
In between painting and wiring up an electric fan we sat on our folding chairs in the sunshine and ate cherry shortbread and drank coffee, and thought that life was jolly good.
We are at work now, and life is still jolly good, although a few more customers would be handy.
We are going to get the children tomorrow.
