I am still, you will have noticed, managing to operate the site despite endless threats from the internet provider, in red, explaining that my storage is full.
So far I have managed by deleting hundreds of photographs. If you go back in time you will discover that lots are missing. I am sad about this, but not disheartened. I am going to have to do something about the site sooner or later, since it is running at 240% of its storage capacity, but so far it has just been too difficult and time consuming, and I have not got round to it.
Hence if I suddenly vanish without a trace, you will know what has happened. Be patient and I will return. Probably.
In the meantime I have been occupying myself with lots of other activities, I have not merely been loafing about idly in the sunshine.
Today’s project was to unearth Lucy’s old Barbie dolls. She has not played with these very much since she became a detective, and I thought I would take advantage of her indifference to play with them myself.
I am going to turn them into fairies for the front garden.
They will not be cute Barbie fairies. They will be slightly scary fairies, doing dreadful things. I still like the idea of having a drowned one in the water trough, possibly with another one pushing it under the water.
I have purchased some modelling clay for the project.
The project has not actually started yet, because it has taken me such a long time to unearth the Barbies. I was not looking forward to this, and in the event my anxieties were entirely justified.
They had been stored in the attic. For some months now the attic has been pristine, a comfortable storage place for all of our smart clothes, and a respectably tidy sewing and ironing space for me.
This changed when first Mark, then Oliver came home and dumped all of their travelling stuff in there. Mark’s has mostly gone now, apart from several boiler suits and a helicopter carry-on bag, but all of Oliver’s still remains, and it seems to be most of the contents of his house.
On top of all of that lot was dumped an awful lot of stuff that has been emptied out of the camper van, mostly several inconveniently large foam seat cushions.
Just to make the whole mess seem worse, the whole place has become a stuffy, airless hole. This is because I purchased a large packet of the sort of miniscule wasps that feed on moths, and released them into the loft to Do Their Worst, who would have thought that responsible adulthood would involve splashing out the price of a bottle of gin on a load of insects. It seemed pointless to open the window after that, since they would all have just buzzed off, so I have been keeping it closed for the prescribed six week period afterwards. They were prisoners, and could jolly well feed on the wicked moths.
Hence the whole place is dusty and stuffy and smells horrid.
Fortunately there were a very lot of dead moths.
I could not open the window because of the six weeks still not being over, and so I had to accustom myself to the dry, gritty air and the faint presence of resentful ghostly moths.
I had thought the Barbie Dolls would probably have been stored in the cupboard with the water tank, which is screwed shut, but when I had finally hunted down a screwdriver and levered it open, the only things in there were some very creative-looking plumbing and a sheep’s skull with a missing horn. I sighed, we do seem to keep some peculiar clutter, and screwed it closed again.
After that they could only have been behind the chest of drawers, in a dusty crawl space filled with moth-corpses.
I went to get Oliver and the hoover.
Oliver rescued me from a small but determined spider, and we set about dragging things out, and to my massive relief the box marked Lucy’s Barbie Dolls was quite close to the top.
After that there came some hoovering and tidying. Oliver sloped off for that bit, but by the time I had finished there was not a deceased moth in sight, and the luggage was piled in a stack in a corner.
The camper van cushions had to go in a very large heap on top of our own suitcases, so it is a good job that we can’t afford another holiday for a while.
I brought the Barbie dolls downstairs in triumph, although there was no time left for moulding them with clay and making them look like fairies, that will have to wait for a couple of days until I have a rush of both time and creativity.
Until then they can just be clutter in the conservatory.
