I am sitting on the taxi rank.
I can hardly move.
Mark asked me this morning if I would consider coming to help at the farm.
I confess to feeling close to no enthusiasm at all for this adventure. However, since we are married I supposed that I ought to make a gesture of support in his difficult shed-moving times.
I agreed that I would come and help, on condition that I was actually going to be able to usefully do things. There is nothing more irritating than hovering about watching Mark being far too involved in some tongue-sticking-out project to delegate anything to his patient assistant.
Actually that isn’t true, there are lots of things which are more irritating, I have just had school on the telephone telling me that Oliver has lost his new set of swimming trunks that I bought to replace the last ones that he lost a couple of weeks ago. That was fairly irritating, and before I hung up I told Matron that he could swim in the nude for the rest of the term.
I unearthed my scruffy farm boots and jumpers.
As it happened it was a truly glorious day, autumn sunshine and blue skies and the acid smell of fallen leaves.
When we got there I could see why Mark’s sister has been getting cross, because Mark’s shed looks no different at all to the way it looked six weeks ago, except rather worse, because he has collected some things together and sorted them into piles.
We shut the door on the shed.
The job for the day was to move Number One Daughter’s camper van.
You will, of course, recollect that this does not have a functioning engine and is waiting for us and Number One Daughter to save up between us all to purchase one. So far we have collectively failed to achieve this.
In fact we put a deposit down on one about a year ago and then none of us ever had the three hundred and fifty quid necessary to complete the purchase, so we didn’t. I suppose they have probably got cross and sold it to somebody else by now, but if ever we have three hundred and fifty quid we will give them a go and pretend to be astonished when they make cross defensive noises.
Number One Daughter’s camper van is very large indeed.
We fastened it to the back of the Land Rover and Mark towed whilst I steered.
All went well until we reached our field, which is of course going to be its new home until we can replace the engine.
The field was very muddy. It has rained a lot here just recently.
The Land Rover slipped and skidded and tore great ruts in the grass, but it would not tow the camper van up the hill.
In the end we gave up, and Mark left me and the camper van blocking the lane. He went back to the farm, where as good fortune would have it, our friend Pete was using his dumper truck to shift some gravel.
The dumper truck did tow the camper van up the hill. Not very far, and not to anywhere we had hoped we might reach, but at least it was off the lane and also away from the farm.
There were great black scars dug into the landscape where all of the tyres had been.
We looked at them anxiously.
We decided that we needed to do something about the dreadfully slippery state of the ground. You cannot move a digger, several cars, a workshop and a handful of trailers into a field if the entrance is a blackened swamp.
We needed to create a road.
Up at the top of the field there were a couple of tons of wood chippings which Mark had persuaded the men to bring from the Library Gardens when the trees were cut down.
In another field there was a pile of flagstones, and in yet another, a pile of the sort of slabs you lay down and the grass grows through them.
Mark moved the slabs and flagstones in the Land Rover.
I had a wheelbarrow and an enormous pile of chippings.
I suppose at least I was moving them downhill.
The sun was shining, and for the first time in ages I was obliged to work until I actually became damp with the perspiring labour of it all.
I slipped in the mud, and shovelled and tipped and staggered and raked.
Mark stacked flagstones.
I have discovered exactly how very unfit I have become.
I am aching all over.
Especially my left thumb is aching but that is not muscle strain but because I dropped a flagstone on it.
I have got no words for the exhausting labour of the day. I have never been so pleased to see the sun set, heralding the moment when the shovel might be abandoned with a clear conscience.
I had flung it to the ground within seconds of the last bright golden rays disappearing behind the fells. Obviously I had got to pick up up again to chuck it in the back of the Land Rover, but you get the picture.
We have got the beginnings of a road, of sorts, up to the place where the shed will be.
I have got a splinter and some aching muscles.
How much I am looking forward to tomorrow.
