The sun has begun to shine again, much to everybody’s massive relief, and I have left the fire to go out.
The day has become pleasantly warm, albeit with a bracing wind on the fells this morning, and I have felt the cold rigidity slowly begin to melt out of my limbs again.
It makes life very much nicer. The last few days have been so horribly wet and cold that it has been hard to remember it is the summertime, and I have not in the least felt like doing anything outdoors. I have opened all of the windows of my taxi, and it is slowly beginning to dry out after last night’s sodden, grumbling passengers.
It was so pleasant that I opened the skylight in the attic when I went up there to carry on with the yet-unfinished ironing. It dawned on me as I wrote those words that actually I forgot to shut it, and I had better remember the next time I go home, otherwise the house will be freezing again by the time it goes dark.
The ironing still isn’t finished. I wasn’t that keen.
Instead, I went downstairs to get on with a job that has been looking at me for the past week, which was to clean and re-wax our Barbour coats.
These are not items of everyday wear, but usually live in the camper van. This is because I hate anoraks and coats that rustle. It is a horrible noise which sounds like very poor people in a bus queue, and should be accompanied by a odour of cigarette smoke and a faint tang of unwashedness. This leaves me with a choice of heavy wool or waxed coats on winter days.
Also a Barbour coat is wearable on almost every occasion, no matter how smart or otherwise. We have had many trips which have required both warmth for beach-wanderings, and smart attire for aspirational public-school parent attempts to impersonate the middle classes, and Barbour coats meet every sartorial requirement.
Hence we have kept them in the camper van, so that they could not be forgotten.
The camper van, as you know, is being emptied, and before I packed our coats away alongside all the rest of the clutter, I thought I would re-wax them.
This is a very satisfactory task involving heating a tin of wax in a pan of hot water, and dipping a cloth in it to smear it all over the coats, making them shiny and smooth. All their wrinkles disappear, and they look like new again, apart from the bits you have forgotten and the bits where you have accidentally dripped wax on the lining.
I hung them up, shinily, in the conservatory, to warm gently in the sunlight, and loaded the packed boxes into the taxi to take to the shed. The emptying of the camper van has become very like a long and uncertain house move, the sort that you have when your tenancy agreement is about to expire but you haven’t quite organised another flat yet, and every one that you look at is twice what you can afford. There is a lot of frowning, and packing things into boxes, and not knowing what to do with the curtains.
When I had unloaded the boxes and stacked them at the back of the shed, I filled the back of the taxi again, much to the discomfort of the dogs, whom like to stretch out.
Today’s load should be the last, I think. There were curtains, and clothes out of the wardrobe, and almost as an afterthought, the wine locker.
This proved an unexpected source of treasure. Somebody who likes us very much had very thoughtfully filled this with all sorts of simply gloriously lovely things. Quite apart from the nightcap bottles of Bailey’s and sweet sherry, there were four bottles of champagne, none of your Prosecco rubbish. There were a couple of bottles of Beaujolais, some Calvados, some very nice single malt, and an assortment of gin and white wine, and for some reason that escaped me, because I have no recollection of ever having bought it, two bottles of Captain Morgan rum with added pineapple. Both of them were unopened, so I must have forgotten about them very quickly, perhaps I bought them in my sleep.
There was barely room for it all on the bottom of the dresser, which is where we keep our alcohol at home, and I reflected gloomily what a tragedy it is that drinking makes you fat and drunk, because I would have liked to have poured myself a glass there and then, but couldn’t, of course, because of going to work.
I don’t drink when Mark is offshore anyway. Oil rigs are dry, and it wouldn’t seem fair.
I think perhaps we might make up for it when he gets back.
I will pop across to the chemist and get some indigestion tablets in readiness.
