We have bought a generator.
It is a massive generator, one that will run Mark’s welder and other enormous car-repairing tools.
This is because there is no electricity at the shed, and we will need somewhere for him to repair cars this winter. It is rubbish to be mending them in the alley at the back of the house, especially when it is raining.
Also, we have consoled ourselves, after its correspondingly massive price tag, it might come in handy if we have a really bad winter and the electricity goes off.
In all of our many Windermere-dwelling years, the electricity has never yet gone off, but you never know. I think that we might be about to have a bad winter, and it is a good thing to be prepared.
It would not be impossible, we have had one or two excitingly wintery moments over the years. In any case, I quite like the idea. It is always lovely when one is misfortunately rendered incapable of working by climatic events which are completely outside one’s control, a sort of seasonal bonus in the usually dreary months of frosts and occasional floods. I would not be at all sorry to find ourselves snowbound, even if it did mean that I would be obliged to use dried milk on my porridge.
I pointed out to Mark that the generator was probably a bit too big to fit through the gate into the back yard, but he was not daunted. We could always take the gate off and put it somewhere else if ever we did have to bring it home from the shed, he explained.
I hope he is not offshore when the climatic events hit. I would not have the first idea how to go about unbolting the gate and taking it somewhere else.
There is a third potential use for it, I thought happily, after we had finished wondering about power cuts, and that is that the Mrs. Number Two Daughters are planning to get married next year, and are contemplating the possibility of coming back to the UK for an enormous celebratory bash. They would like to do a marquee, and camping, Number Two Daughter explained, and by a fortunate chance of fate we have an unused field, unused apart from the sheep, that is, and we have volunteered it for the purpose.
Since we will have a colossally huge generator we will be able to put real electric lights on and she can have a DJ if she likes. We were pleased at this possibility. She wants a hog roast, we might even be in time to rear up a couple of pigs if we get our act together, and if they get married in September it is the perfect time to kill them just after you have fed them on everybody’s windfall apples for a week or two.
I don’t suppose we will bother with pigs again really, we are a bit too busy these days, probably we will just buy one like everybody else, but it is a nice idea, and fills me with wistful recollections of our farming times, when we could cook whole dinners for lots of visitors without buying a single thing except coffee and salt.
It was an awful lot of hard work really.
I do not work nearly as hard these days. Today I managed to get two loads of laundry done and a bit of sweeping up, and really by the time I had emptied the dogs and made dinners, that was about everything. I am dividing the spare moments in the afternoons between editing my stories, which task I have still not completed, and painting the Advent calendars, which task I have barely started.
If the winter is too snowy to go to work then I might get lots of things done, especially if we can generate our very own electricity.
It will be too late for the Advent calendars but I suppose I could always start on next year’s.
