I seem to have occupied the entire day trotting around organising the things from the camper van.

I can’t think of anything else. I sat down here on the taxi rank, and made a mental inventory of my day’s activities, and there didn’t seem to be anything on it. I seem to have run around for the whole day and achieved absolutely nothing whatsoever.

I have washed and carefully packed away everything that once lived in the bathroom, and  I have washed about a dozen curtains and pegged them on the line, because the sun is shining and we are basking in glorious warmth. There are about a dozen more to go. I was unsure about this activity, because I do not know if we are going to re-use the curtains, but then I reflected how very horrible it would be to fit a new window, and then decide that we had the very perfect curtain to hang in front of it, only to discover that it was smelly and festering in a grubby pile, somewhere in the attic stuffed into an ancient bin liner.

Hence I have resolved to wash them all, and have been packing them away neatly in vacuum bags. They might turn out to be a happy present for Future Me, or they might just rot there until the children throw them away when we die, but it does not really matter. There is so much clutter up there that they will not want that it might be easier just to set fire to the house.

I know I am having a crisis about what to do with all the clothes that are now stored up there because they do not fit me any more. In a perfect world I would like to throw them away, but if I get fat again I know that I will regret such a hasty clearance, and it is causing me a great deal of perplexed frowning. I will never be able to traipse about the house in a white dressing gown with a candle if I don’t get better at chucking things out.

If anybody is a Size Sixteen and would like some jeans please let me know.

I have just dashed home for a quick bathroom visit and it has been such a splendidly warm day that even now, at nine o’clock at night, I was able to haul the dry curtains off the line and peg yet another load out.

In other news, I have been purchasing some wine glasses on eBay. These are intended for the camper van, of course, which is a bit premature because we haven’t actually started taking it apart yet, but when we start building the shelves we will need to do some tongue-sticking-out precision cutting for the glasses, we are going to cut holes in the shelves from which some can dangle upside-down, and other holes in which others can be placed upright. Hence I have justified my mild guilt about their purchase to myself, and they arrived today, much to my excitement.

They are every bit as beautiful and lovely as glasses for the Orient Express jolly well ought to be, and I am feeling very pleased. The only problem was that there were several of them, bought from various different sellers, and every one arrived looking as though it had been packaged by a newspaper-and-sellotape fiend.

There were boxes inside boxes, and layers and layers of scrumpled newspaper, and one tiresome salesperson had also filled the box with those dreadful bits of polystyrene that weigh nothing but stick to your fingers and then fly everywhere whenever you try to scoop them gently out of the way.

They flew everywhere and I had an exasperating few minutes trying to scrape them off the floor and then gently dislodge them back into the box.

Unwrapping it all took ages, and when I had finished I had so much paper and cardboard that I did not even bother with the dustbin, which was full anyway, and so was next door’s because there are people on their holidays there and they seem to eat and drink an awful lot of heavily-packaged rubbish. There are empty beer cans and pizza boxes and all manner of horrors stuffed therein.

Fortunately the bin men come tomorrow. We will never manage to be considered a middle class postcode at this rate.

I had to shove everything in the car and take it all to the recycling bin in the Library Gardens car park, who would have thought that opening a couple of parcels would be so much nuisance.

The whole lot seems to have taken me all day, I was very relieved to pour a cup of tea and sit down when Mark telephoned.

I am sitting down now, which is lovely. There are a few people milling about, and the evening is gentle and pale.

It  is a very tranquil way to earn a living sometimes.