I have finally started on the ironing, after having realised, to my chagrin, that it has been lying in a crumpled pile in the loft for just over a month.
I am not impressed with this housewifely neglectfulness.
I haven’t even finished it, although I was ironing for hours and hours.
Worse than that, it looks as though we are going to go out for dinner next week, which means we will have to wear some of it and then I will have a crumpled pile all over again.
Truly the life of a virtuous housewife is very difficult to sustain, nobody will be offering any rubies for me this week.
I will have to finish the rest tomorrow.
It isn’t even as if it was an unpleasant job, because it wasn’t, not really. I put the story on my telephone, which is currently a blood-and-thunder detective story, really I don’t know how people manage to imagine all of these horrible crimes, truly I don’t. I would have nightmares if I had been dreaming up all of these shocking crimes for a fictional detective to detect, and I have to try not to think about them afterwards as it is.
Anyway, I stood peaceably in the attic, smoothing our smart clothes into a state of satisfactory flatness, and listened to the rain on the roof and a gripping yarn on my telephone, occasionally filling the iron with cologne-scented water and daydreaming myself into a state of contented tranquillity.
Apart from flattening things, I seem to be spending a good deal of my life at the moment fattening Oliver up, like the witch in Hansel and Gretl, every day he pokes a finger out and I feel it to see if it is still bony. Actually he doesn’t, what he does at the moment is eats and sleeps. His current security assignment involves him working all night, looking menacing around caravan sites and industrial estates, and so I am not seeing very much of him. He arrived home at about seven this morning, provoking tiresome Roger Poopy into a cacophony of territorial barking until he realised that it was Oliver and not Bill Sykes. He slept for the rest of the day after that, until it was time for him to go to the gym.
He is eating his head off. I do not believe in protein drinks that are supposed to be good for you with no evidence whatsoever except a lot of incomprehensible powdered ingredients, so I have invented my own. It consists of raw eggs mixed with condensed milk, double cream, bananas, a large scoop of peanut butter and vanilla, all whipped together with full-fat milk.
He has been drinking these for a couple of days, and eating everything he can find.
This morning he announced dolefully that he had lost weight.
Life is just not fair.
In other news, you might be interested to hear that this afternoon I resumed my glueing attempts on the smelly oil diffuser thing. Having learned my lesson from last time, this afternoon I wore a pair of Mark’s rubber gloves.
They are the right size for Mark’s hands, not mine, and course it took no time at all before the flapping bits on the ends of the fingers were stuck together. Then they stuck to the bits of pottery I was trying to glue. When I lost my patience and took them off, they stuck to the table.
I did not discover that until later.
I could not see the bits of pottery I was trying to glue in any case because they were hidden behind bits of flappy rubber gloves. There was once a popular comedy act which consisted of somebody trying to rid themselves of a piece of chewing gum which then stuck to their fingers, which stuck to their clothes, which stuck to their legs, etcetera.
It was like that.
In the end the bits did not fit into the holes in any case. I do not know what went wrong.
I abandoned it. It still has some holes. I am not going to bother trying to squeeze the last remaining pieces into it.
I am covered in glue again. I have had enough.
