When we got up this morning Mark said that I should do the relaxation exercises that the sports therapy lady gave to me.
I was not terribly convinced by this as I don’t think my problem is caused by a lack of relaxation, and if it was and I wanted to put it right I would have half a bottle of wine and a takeaway and watch a DVD.
Despite this entirely sensible argument Mark insisted, and offered to do them with me, to keep me company.
You are supposed to do them lying on the floor.
We have not got a very great deal of floor space, so we moved the rug and the coffee table in the living room and lay down there.
The dogs were very excited indeed to find that we had come to keep them company on the floor, and ran around jumping over us happily and barking.
It is very difficult to relax properly when there is a smelly dog sitting on your chest ecstatically licking your ears. I had closed my eyes for the purposes of relaxing, and when I opened them I discovered that I had a perfect view up Roger Poopy’s nostrils.
I laughed so much that Mark said I wasn’t concentrating properly, and kept reminding me to breathe in the right places.
It must have been because I was breathing in the wrong places that it didn’t work, but when we got up my trapped nerve was just as exciting as ever and so I took some drugs, which worked splendidly no matter how I breathed, hurrah for science.
Lucy had already departed for her day of floristry, and so we dived up to Booths for some ethical shopping, because of having absolutely nothing left in the house to eat again. We bought crisps made of vegetables and some upmarket chocolate ginger biscuits and went to the farm.
It was cold.
It was jolly cold.
I was wearing all three jumpers and my woolly socks and boots, and then I was obliged to put on a thick knitted hat and a scarf. This is not cheering dress for almost July, and I thought about the poor tennis players who will be running around in their underclothes practising for Wimbledon, how awful.
We kept ourselves fortified with ginger biscuits and flasks of hot drinks, and I painted pictures whilst Mark installed the new dashboard, which is pictured above. This is especially exciting because it is attached to wiring, and not only is it all there, but things work as well.
I can promise you that this is an entirely new experience in the camper van, where not much on the dashboard has ever worked at all, mostly because Monsieur Banana Fingers, the previous owner, burnt all the wiring out with an experimental sound system which he was entirely unqualified to install.
Some things still will not work. The thing which tells you how many miles you have travelled will not work, nor will the rev. counter. Mark says that the problem is that these instruments in our van were designed for vehicles built in the nineteen seventies, and now engine things are too electronic to be attached to our dashboard. This means that anybody who was buying the van would look and think that improbably it had only ever travelled eighty thousand kilometres in its forty year lifetime, which I can assure you is not the case.
Actually they probably wouldn’t think that.
The picture is the new dashboard. Mark is very pleased with it indeed.
We went home when we had drunk all the tea and eventually become too cold to function properly.
When we got home Lucy was curled up on the sofa wrapped in a blanket, so we lit the fire, which has helped a lot. My fingers have been so cold that even though they are nicely warm now they still feel fat and clumsy.
We have still not caught up on sleep so we are going to try and get an early night.
I am looking forward to this.
I can’t stop yawning.
Perhaps it is because of the relaxation.
