Being at work on a wet Wednesday evening at this time of year is not at all bad.
I can sit here completely untroubled for hours at a time. Nobody seems to feel the need to disturb my book, or my cup of tea, or even my picnic.
I do not need to tell anybody that no, I have not been busy, and that I will probably finish at some time that they will find shockingly late, and that yes, people do find things to do even here at that time in the morning. Become drunk, mostly, and no, I am not frightened of them.
People ask about that a lot. A couple of weeks ago I picked up some tourists outside one pub to take them to the nightclub, and a local drunk talked them into giving him a lift as well.
They made the gesture towards polite conversation that I have recorded above, and I explained that no, I am not afraid of the customers, even though I am a girl, mostly because I have yet to come across one who is more unpleasant than I am.
There was a grunt from the back, and the local nodded in enthusiastic agreement.
“‘S true, that,” he said, sourly, “she’s ‘orrible.”
It is raining hard, but I am pleasingly dry here in my taxi. I have got wifi signal and a jolly good book, and feel that apart from the obvious absence of actual cash, there could not be a better way of earning a living.
We could do with earning some more cash, because we are busily changing our lives again at the moment. Mark’s sister has said that she is going to put the whole farm up for auction, and that our deadline to be Out And Gone For Ever is now the twenty fifth of October, which is when she wants to start letting people come and view it. She thinks it will sell better without our camper van and Number One Daughter’s camper van and the donor taxi and Oliver’s car and the trailer, and all of our general clutter and collection of things that Mark thinks might come in useful one day.
We are not exactly surprised at this conclusion but had hoped to have a bit longer, so in consequence have been thrown into something of a muddle. Mark’s uncle has kindly offered to help us out if we need it, but we rather like the idea of building our own shed, and in any case in four weeks are not going to get much time to do anything else.
The Master Plan for the current get-everything-out emergency is this.
Obviously some things can come home to the tool sheds at our house. Mark has a couple of large wheeled toolboxes which are fairly easily portable, and can be used for most of his general stuff.
After that we had got a problem.
In the end Mark unearthed an elderly stock trailer from the corner where it was rotting beside a muck heap on the end field. He had to clean it out because it had once had chickens living in it.
Once he had cleaned it out he had to take the floor out because it had gone rotten, and also somebody seems to have removed and lost the door.
Obviously having no door and no floor is a small detail for somebody of Mark’s abilities, and so he has spent his day being busily engaged in reconstructing these features.
When he has finished he is going to use it for storing things that I don’t want him to bring home, or that won’t fit in his tool shed, like his collection of useful wheels and spare bits of donor taxi and camper van axles.
Then he is going to tow it up to the top of the field and take the wheels off it so that nobody can steal it.
You can have a trailer in a field without needing planning permission. This is obviously true since it has been there for at least the last fifteen years to my knowledge, and nobody has suggested that we get planning permission for it yet.
After that he is going to move the horse shed which is already in the field to be beside it, move Number One Daughter’s camper van to the other side, leaving a decent sized space in the middle. Then he is going to sheet over it all.
Around all of that he is going to stack our newly-acquired timber. We did this before in France. You cut it all into metre lengths and stack it until you have got a tall metre-thick wall. In France we built a large log store like this. It was open at one side, with three log walls and some long lengths across the top with sheeting across them.
When you have done this, not only is your firewood drying nicely, but you have also got a dry area in the middle for stacking more timber and cutting it up away from the weather.
Obviously then you have got to keep rebuilding bits of it as you take timber out to burn it. If you have done it properly you should replace a wall every year, and it is a very satisfying feeling. There is no feeling nicer than a large stack of dry firewood.
We have got enough timber to go all the way around our parked vehicles with the space in the middle. It will look nice and tidy and rural, nobody will be able to steal any of it without a great deal of wood-shifting inconvenience, and it will be dry and sheltered enough for Mark to have enough space there to do any repair work that he needs to do in the meantime. We have got a couple of generators, and think that we will probably manage very nicely.
It will be a good start.
