I have been told that these pages will be cut off tomorrow, so I jolly well hope that the new provider has done as they promised and saved them all, they would be a jolly lot of writing to lose.
I don’t know if they will make it on to your screens tomorrow, we will just have to see.
Fingers crossed.
In the meantime I am sure you are agog to know how life has been proceeding since the last major event of Sheet Washing Day, and the answer is much the same, but not quite as exciting.
It has been a little bit exciting, actually, because the sun shone.
This is an almost completely novel experience at the moment, and it has been a very happy time indeed.
Mark went off to the shed when we finally got up, which was not early, and Oliver and I went off over the fells to have a very splendid walk with the dogs.
Oliver had a night off last night. He went to bed and slept for nineteen hours, so he might have been burning the candle at too many ends for a while.
The result was that he was exceptionally bouncy and cheery this morning, and chattered away enthusiastically. Soldier Magazine has done a feature about women in the Army this month, including, of course, Number One Daughter, and we stopped to loaf about in the sunshine for ten minutes whilst we talked to her on the telephone and made admiring noises. Some other soldier had admitted that he found her intimidating, which we agreed did not bode well for the state of the British Army if it has got to go and face thousands of shrieking Iranian Revolutionary Guards, since Number One Daughter is 5’2” and endearingly absent-minded about the places she might have left her telephone, passport and car keys.
After that Oliver dropped me at the camper van, because he was off to the gym, in order to grow up big and strong like his sister.
Mark was building the steps.
He has bent them into step shape but hadn’t quite got his welding machine working, because it involved a little chip that needed to be attached to the computer, but which didn’t fit into his Apple computer, so we had to wait until we got home and then ask the omniscient AI all about it. Incidentally, I don’t have any AI of my own any more, because it told me I asked too many questions in one day, as if I was eight years old or something. I complained hard about this, and they just gave me my money back and told me to find my intelligence elsewhere, so I am relying on Google once more. This is disappointing. I liked AI. I am sure we could have been friends.
Whilst Mark was step-bending, I screwed up my courage once more to go on the top of the van to take the last couple of windows out of the roof. It was not quite as terrifyingly windy today, but in any case I have never believed that being scared of an activity is any reason not to do it, and so I gritted my teeth and climbed the ladder.
It is only three meters above the ground, but being on the roof was no better than last time. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that it was potentially worse. I sat on the roof with as much clinging determination as I could manage, and unbolted the window frames. Then I scraped off the top layers of glue and unscrewed them.
My teeth were clenched so tightly that my jaw ached. I kept telling myself that it was all right, and encouraging myself to look at the beautiful scenery, which helped not at all, and in the end I stopped being patiently supportive with myself and just told me, firmly, to get on with it, for goodness’ sake. This worked, more or less, helped by Mark shouting up to wonder why on earth I hadn’t finished yet, and in the end the windows were off, and we could set about disengaging their glued-down aluminium surround.
This involved setting fire to the glue and then scraping it off with the jiggly tool. Mark did the sitting on the burning roof bit whilst I stood on the ladder, which was infinitely preferable, not least because the thrillingly toxic glue fumes made my head spin again.
The sun was setting by the time we staggered down, and I breathed glueless air with a sigh of fuzzy-headed relief.
With any luck the sun will shine again tomorrow.
We might even start getting the new windows measured and cut.
