A pressing bladder-related emergency drove me out of bed far too soon this morning, and once we were awake, that seemed to be it, so we had coffee and got up.
It was Sunday, which has become our much-enjoyed glorious Day Off, apart from having to go to work in the evening. It was only one sort of work, however, and only for six hours, which is wonderful and restorative, and we don’t mind it anyway, because of Sunday nights being quiet with lots of time to read and write diaries.
It was only ten o’ clock. We sat in bed and speculated what we could do with so much free time.
We decided that Mark would cut firewood and I would give the dogs a haircut. Both of these jobs have been waiting, helplessly, for ages.
Firewood, at this end of the year, is always a bit exciting, because we are never quite sure whether or not we have enough dry wood to see us through. Fortunately we had a trailer load of palettes donated to us a couple of months ago, and today at last, we could get them cut up.
The dogs had become horribly scruffy: indeed, somebody looked at them a few weeks ago and laughed, and said that if one was going to have scruffy dogs, one might as well embrace the concept.
I can live with scruffy with equanimity, but I have become fed up of hoovering dog hair out of the carpet. They are not supposed to be the sort of dogs who shed hair, but inexplicably, Roger Poopy does. It goes everywhere. Just to make matters worse, both of them smelled.
I put an old sheet over the kitchen table and Lucy helped hold them whilst I clipped.
It is harder to do haircuts than you might think. My hairdresser has gone up in my estimation yet again. In all the time I have been visiting him he has never once drawn blood from my ear, which was a misfortunate accident I had at one point today. I imagine it is marginally easier, because I don’t think he is concerned that I might bite him, nor does anybody have to forcibly restrain me at any point, but all the same, he does a sterling job.
There are an awful lot of corners on a dog. It is hard work to get into all of them, and it took ages. It was fun to do, in a perverse sort of way, like peeling off thick layers to find out what the dogs really looked like underneath. By the time I had finished they had shrunk to a far more manageable size. I clipped their toenails and snipped the fur between their toes, until they were tidy and entirely respectable.
The shaven hair filled a large carrier bag and also the hoover. The dogs are bald and shivering. No longer will they come down from the fell with mud heavily clotted around their undersides and paws. They are streamlined and smooth, and their general odour has improved enormously.
Clearing up was a bit of a task. I was about to put the bag of hair into the dustbin, when I had the happy recollection that it is bird-nesting season, and so emptied it on to the compost heap instead.
It was a matter of moments.
The birds, who watch our garden with hopeful interest in case of presents, immediately came to investigate. After a minute the back garden was full of them. They hopped on to the compost heap and shouted to their cousins. Then they dived on the huge pile of hair and stuffed their beaks with as much as they could possibly carry.
There was a very great deal of it, and they came back and back, much to my huge satisfaction. How absolutely brilliant to think that we have contributed to the warmth and comfort of hundreds of baby birds. By the time we had finished cleaning the kitchen, almost the whole lot had disappeared.
The dogs curled up on the sofa and shivered.
It was almost time to go to work. Mark went to get the valves out of the camper van heater, because it is not working properly and needed some attention: and I made prawn salad and paprika chicken and peppers for us to take to work.
Oliver sent me a text whilst I was thus occupied.
He is having a nice time but is very disgruntled by the third-rate quality of the hotel. Oliver’s experiences of hotels have been formed by my tastes, and he was shocked to find that there were cracks in the plaster and that the furniture was of a terribly inferior quality. He feels as though he has been asked to live in a complete ruin, and is not at all happy about it.
This cheered all of us up very much. We sent him encouraging texts telling him that he would be absolutely fine and that warm and clean was the important thing with hotels, and having fun with his friends was the important thing about holidays. Mark laughed so much he could hardly hold his screwdriver, and said that I had created a very expensive miniature of myself.
I think I am quite pleased about this. Clearly he has got very good taste.
I hope he grows up to be successful enough to afford it.
