Again. It’s raining again and I miss my walks but there are some things that no one sensible does in strong winds and heavy rain. One of those is walking beside a harbour where the sea is doing a pretty good job of trying to take back the land or beneath old trees that are already leaning alarmingly or on muddy paths. All that goes double if her balance isn’t as good as it once was or she’d like it to be.
So I suspect I’ll carry on my revamp project today, and remind myself that yes, the broken pipes were a pain, but it’s long past time that I looked at the little room that was described as a scullery when we bought our Victorian house. Most people have knocked it through along with the breakfast room and the outside loo and made a long narrow kitchen and then a long living/dining room. We’ve kept all our rooms because smaller rooms are easier to heat and I like the sense of history of the house.
We also get our water from a tank beneath the ground that’s fed from a natural spring, so we have mineral water. Yay! It tastes amazing. Not so yay, you get limescale like you wouldn’t believe so I’ve been scrubbing the sink and taps with a mixture of bicarbonate of soda and vinegar. It doesn’t harm the environment or stink the place out in a way that’s bad for fish and birds and not good for husbands and sons who both have limited lung capacity for various reasons. It also foams up very satisfyingly while it does its work, exactly as it’ll have been used since the house was built in 1886. It takes time to fight back the limescale, but every day the sink gets a little shinier and I like the thought that I'm not replacing the sink and taps even if they are 38 years old.
I’ve also been culling the collection of plastic boxes which seem to build up, and hate being with their lids and the lids that don’t fit any of the boxes so presumably come from a parallel dimension. Or is that just me? I do hope so for your sake! I’ve got a new bin and a stacking fruit rack and boxes to store all the kitchen chemicals in coming because we’re going to have to replace the kitchen units and my dear husband has set his heart on reorganising the room at the same time. I’ll also soon have a caddy to put all my cleaning stuff in to make it easier to carry round and a super posh sink tidy, and I don’t care how much you laugh at how pleased I am by all these little things. In fact, I hope you do because there’s never anything like enough to laugh at, is there?
So my sort out is by way of making it look as good as I can until/unless that happens because he’s a cancer survivor who has more limits than he cares to admit,. Meanwhile, it is making the room look more cheerful, which makes me feel more cheerful. I never expected to be domesticated but I am becoming it.
Some of my heroines do too, but the one in the book that’s out on Thursday very definitely isn’t. Eleanor and I have a lot in common, although sadly not the lean height and natural elegance. We’ve both had rheumatoid arthritis for a long time and neither of us thump people who tell us we’re too young to have arthritis, no matter how much we want to. We both have immunotherapy too, just as Laura does in my Harbourside series and I don’t apologise for having two characters with it, because between a quarter of a per cent and one per cent of people have it, and it’s twice as common in women as in men.
The thing about immunotherapy and steroids are that they’re game changers in terms of controlling the disease, but it also means that your immune system has been turned right down, which makes you very vulnerable to all sorts of nasty things. Oddly, I’ve never had that many problems with flu, but getting Covid caused a massive flare and so did every vaccination I had. I had them every six months until they realised what was happening so they did a lot of damage. These days, I don’t, and like Eleanor and Laura I live a very different life from the one I expected to and meet people outside and avoid shops or anywhere else people gather.
Don’t feel sorry for me because I love the life I’ve got and the delivery guys and ladies are amazing and amused by my projects as I turn the Victorian House, as I christened it, into my very own version of a seaside bed and breakfast. (Well, if Escape to the Country can call a house half an hour’s walk from the sea a seaside home then so can I!) I never particularly liked shopping, and while I liked eating out, I’m loving learning to cook better and all the wonderful kitchen toys and pretty crockery. I make an effort with meals and remind myself that my projects are funded by not doing things I used to love and take for granted.
Eleanor doesn’t feel that way. At the start of the book she’s angry with the whole world and most of all with herself. She’s an architect because that’s a profession I admire, and means she’s self employed and she loves her job but has ruled out relationships. For one thing, most of her hurts and for another, how do you have a passionate relationship while keeping a safe distance away from other people? If you’ve read ‘A Place to Call Home’ which came out in September, then you’ll know that I left her in trouble, so obviously I had to get her out again… It’ll be out on Thursday and I hope you like it.
We all know what's going to happen, which brings me round to today’s picture, which is a nice indoors one, of a cup of coffee made for me by my amazing husband. We’ve been married for more than 38 years, and he still finds ways to say ‘I Love you’ and laughs at my daftnesses and spoils me as much as I try to spoil him. I know how lucky I am and hope that you are too and that the weather’s improved when we catch up on Wednesday.
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