We have been at the camper van all day, and I got so cold that even though I have been at work for a couple of hours now, with the engine running and the heater on full, I don’t think I will ever be warm ever again.
I was so cold that when I took my socks off I was expecting my toes to come off with them, the way Ranulf Fiennes’ did when he had been exploring somewhere really chilly.
They didn’t, though, which was probably just as well, and we sat next to the fire for half an hour, drinking tea and competing with the dogs for getting closest to it.
It has been a very busy day, despite the shocking cold.
We have carried on stripping everything out of it.
There was an awful lot that had to go. The outside skin of the truck bit is aluminium, inside which there was a layer of insulation, held in place with some bits of wood, then another layer of insulation, then boards on the top which had been covered in carpet.
There were lights on the roof and wires everywhere.
Even once everything had been unscrewed, it still all took a lot of tugging and swearing.
We have taken almost everything off and stacked it at the back of the shed, where probably it will get buried and we won’t be able to find it again when we need it.
We have left the very last layer of insulation, which doesn’t need to come off except in a few places where we will be putting the new windows in. We have been drawing these on to the walls and scowling at them, contemplatively.
The dogs charged around outside and then cried to come into the truck with us. There is no door on the truck at the moment, but they can’t get in because the floor is such a long way off the ground, easily higher than my waist. Mark is going to build some steps but he hasn’t done it yet, and so the dogs have got to be lifted in. We didn’t mind doing this until they had been in there for half an hour, heard something exciting in the yard and leaped down to bark at it, after which they cried to be lifted back in again.
After we had done this several times we started to yell that it just served them right, but we still had to get down and lift them up anyway, because it is not possible to listen heartlessly to grief-stricken dog whimpering for very long.
We staggered home when it went dark, to get ready for work. We had to do this because we didn’t work last night, and we are running out of cash.
We stayed at home last night and watched a film. It was a rubbish film, with a wearily nonsensical sort of plot. It was about a choir in Yorkshire during World War One. The soprano singer was a black girl. Nobody in the village seemed to think that there was anything unusual about being black, which perhaps there wasn’t, because according to the film, rural Yorkshire in the nineteen hundreds seemed to have a fairly large population of integrated black people.
I thought that it would have been much more interesting if the film had shown the way a rural village of the time might have treated a black person, but it didn’t. Instead it showed us that black people have got absolutely nothing to complain about because they have always been treated with incurious fairness and equality, even in the remotest depths of rural England a hundred years ago.
There were several gay characters in the film as well, all of whom were also treated with tranquil acceptance. I had always thought that gay people a hundred years ago were considered in much the same light as paedophiles are now, and given just about that much sympathy, courtesy and generosity, but it turned out not to be so. Everybody in the film was politely understanding and completely untroubled at finding such criminals in their midst, in short, the film was utter tripe from beginning to end.
I do wish that film studios would start running compulsory history classes for their staff, since clearly they are not learning much at school. There were several very interesting stories that could have been written about a choir with gay and black people a hundred years ago, but they didn’t write any of them.
I am looking forward to the day when Woke goes out of fashion.
It will be good to have sensible films again.
