Well here we are, only five hours since my last post, and my mind has had a make-over. After taking the dog-puppies for a very pleasant amble through the lanes and tracks around our land, and then going round the circuit again, just because I could, and just because it was lovely, I have poked the Demon of Irresolution in the eye with a sharp stick, and resolved to be as idle as possible until Simon returns.
Before launching resolutely into my remaining twenty-four hour sojourn in the Land of Sloth, I did manage to vacuum the house – which is no mean feat, given that it is a house with a draughty front door which opens straight into the living room, which has nothing but gappy floorboards between it and the dusty attic above, and which is inhabited by three dogs, eights cats, a wood-burning stove, and multiple boots caked in mud and wellies full of hay. I also changed the bag first, having eventually discovered two boxes of new bags in two equally random places – one full of bags that don’t fit our cleaner, and one full of bags that also don’t fit our cleaner despite the label on the outside saying that they do. Why do the little things in life have to be so hard?
Anyway, with a bit of Blue-Peter creativity and the deft application of a crafty cut of fortuitous cardboard, I contrived the resurrection of the suckiness, and have delivered the house from another dead-dog’s worth of dirt. There were moments during the exercise when I considered the possible sensibleness of sweeping up the worst of the debris first. But, surely, the whole point of having a vacuum cleaner is so that you don’t have to sweep, for god’s sake. And then I thought about some of the ridiculously large stuff that my son trundles over with a vacuum cleaner, because, well, he just can’t-be-arsed to bend down and pick up that two-pence coin; that ball of used tissue; that old sock! And I realised where he gets it from. And why I pay good money to fly to England every six weeks or so, just so I can empty his (bagless, but useless) cleaner, and poke long metal things down the blocked hose.
Of course, within minutes of putting the stinky-again cleaner away in that difficult-to-reach space behind the freezer, the cats tumbled back indoors to sprawl hairy and fluffy on the waiting expanse of pristine sofa, the dog-puppies found some more bits of unguarded firewood to chew into a splintery mess, and I carelessly cut a slice of crusty bread which billowed a cloud of flake and crumb across the flawless floor.
Life is just full of Sisyphean moments.
