I am becoming a populist.
I am going to improve your Windermere Diaries Experience in order that it becomes in tune with modern living and also that it will hang well with the kids.
I have employed Lucy to upgrade me.
She is sitting here beside me as I write, considering methods of making my site look fashionable so that people will read it. I mean other people, obviously, as well as you.
If lots of people read it then I could persuade companies to advertise on it and then the Reader Experience could also be improved by lots of pop-up adverts so you would have to click the hidden cross in the corner in order to be able to see the diary underneath it.
Apparently if you are somebody called Jack Septic Eye then the people who make Playstation send you games and headsets in order that you try them out online. I don’t think anybody would be interested in watching me trying to play Minecraft online, but perhaps Autoparts might be grateful for the occasional mention.
I did not stay at the farm for very long today, because I had got to go and have a smear test.
I don’t like these very much. If there was a more dignified way of being healthy then I would definitely choose it
I have upset our practice nurse so much that the doctor does my smear test.
I had to get undressed. This was not my finest hour, because it has been so cold that I was wearing my scarf and sheepskin boots and woollen socks.
The doctor was about fourteen. She was wearing a vest and baggy shorts with Doc Marten boots, and looked a bit surprised as I peeled off several layers. Worse, even though I had had a shower I thought worriedly that perhaps my feet did not smell very nice.
I considered apologising but didn’t, in case she hadn’t noticed, although I think that she probably had. Perhaps when you understand medical things you don’t mind biological scents so much, because you know that they are the natural results of not being dead, which is a reassuringly good state for your patients to be in.
Once we had gone through all the usual stupid things that doctors say, like “Now relax,” and “Goodness me, this is difficult to find, isn’t it?”, and “Oh, dear, I’m sorry about that, did it hurt?” then we retired to her desk so that she could ask me the questions that doctors ask to make sure that you won’t come bothering them with any more trivia for a month or two.
She looked back through my notes and discovered that I had had a contraceptive coil fitted in 2011, and wondered what sort it was. It is a while since I have seen it, and so I wasn’t able to be much help. She frowned thoughtfully.
“They should have given you a little card with the make and model written on it,” she said, “Do you have it with you?”
I checked my pockets helpfully, which made her scowl.
“I need to know if it has expired,” she said crossly.
She explained impatiently that some contraceptive coils wear out after a while. I pointed out that I was fifty, not twenty, and that I didn’t think excessive usage was likely to be a problem, but she shook her head firmly, in the way of fourteen year olds who know everything. Apparently they just stop working. I mean contraceptives, not fourteen year olds, obviously.
I thought this was improbable, since a contraceptive coil doesn’t actually do anything in the first place, just sits around being in the way, and presumably they don’t melt.
She rolled her eyes the way that Lucy does when I tell her useful things.
“It might be one of the sort that expires after five years, in which case it has expired,” she said. “How does a surprise baby sound?”
I cannot imagine anything more unspeakably horrible.
She is going to check with the hospital records and summon me back immediately if necessary.
In the meantime Mark can sleep on the sofa.
Lucy said that if I want people to read my diaries then what I need to do is have a more interesting life.
I thought today’s entry might be a good start.
I wonder if it is relevant enough to click with the youth.
You won’t be surprised to hear that I didn’t take a photograph, but in any case Lucy said that my photographs are rubbish and I ought to try and be more interesting.
Have a picture of Roger Poopy taken this time last year, since we are on the subject of babies.
I have had some kind of technical disaster which has meant that the next post, called Blistering, has not uploaded properly, if you read it you get stuck on the page and can’t go any further back.
I have deleted it and added it again here as part of this post, due to being unable to find any other sort of solution.
Blistering
I have left it very late to start writing this.
I am at work, of course, because of it being Monday night, and the night when all hotel staff go out On The Town.
Nobody finishes work until ten, which is when people on their holidays all go to bed. They are tired out from lungfuls of fresh air and from the blisters acquired when they struggled to the top of Scafell Pike, because of it being the first time they have ever walked any further than the post office.
Hence from ten o’ clock our customers stop being polite middle aged yawning people in anoraks, and become pasty-coloured kitchen porters who smell of cooking and of cigarettes, and who are still only twenty minutes into their acquaintance with the lady beside them.
It is raining very hard.
We have been working on the camper van all day.
As you can see from the picture, my lobster is coming along nicely, it should be dry enough to finish tomorrow.
Mark been installing his water heater whilst I was painting. When I had to stop and wait for the lobster to dry I went around the outside of the camper van sticking the new rubber trim into the aluminium bits along the sides.
This is an unspeakably tedious way to spend a day and has given me an actual blister on my finger, from constantly levering the trim in between the bits of metal.
It is a real blister, white and round and sore, and it has been gained from genuine manual labour. It is not the sort of second-class blister you might get from wearing the wrong sort of boots on your holidays, but an actual mark of determined efforts, except they weren’t that determined because I gave up once I had got a sore finger. I have shown it to Mark several times now, and he is still trying to be sympathetic. This is why I married him.
The only consolation has been that I do like the trim itself, which is bright purple. I have painted the window frames gold to go with it.
This sounds better than it has turned out because the gold paint was some rather elderly stock that we bought from the village ironmonger when the price was reduced to a pound a tin, and it doesn’t seem to be drying properly. In consequence the window frames are now gold coloured with dog hair and sawdust texturing.
Mark has finally fitted his heating invention.
This has taken him all day, and a great deal of earnest frowning.
Of course he has had all of the engine water drained out whilst the heater pipes were in bits on his workbench, and so we have not been able to move the van.
He finally got it all in and bolted down and solidly fastened at the end of today. Then we rushed to put the water back in it so that we could see if the new coil would work.
It does.
In hardly any time at all it was warm and starting to heat the tank. Mark was very pleased.
We did think we might take the van out for a little drive up and down to see if the brakes worked properly, but the paint was still wet and it was raining, so we couldn’t. Instead we had a cup of tea and congratulated ourselves for having an almost-finished and thoroughly illustrated camper van.
I am jolly tired, so I am going to save myself a thousand words.
Here is his water heater again.
