Travaux

What a bizarrely busy day. We were up early, at least by our standards. By 8.30am I was on the top of a set of steps draping the gold silk curtains in my sitting room in swathes of plastic sheeting to protect them from any horrors lurking in the chimney, though we also shrouded the ladderax and all that lurks theron, the piano, the harpsichord and the chairs and sofa. Meanwhile the gas man and his cohort of scaffolders had arrived outside and we could hear the sounds of scaffolding going up on our gable end to where the gas flue pokes from the roof in place of the old chimney stack. 

Duty done with the ladder (Himself doesn't like heights) I changed and dashed off to Pilates feeling as if I'd done an hour's exercise already. By the time I returned and Himself had gone off to his class, the gas man was ready to come indoors and had to help me roll back the carpet before he finished the shrouding with some sheeting of his own. Meanwhile, in the back garden, the builder had come and gone, leaving some mysterious stakes in the ground that are apparently to guide his men on the morrow ...

By late afternoon the dirty work was, I was assured, over. The old flue has been dragged, with difficulty, from the chimney and the new one dropped down. The old gas fire - the one that was condemned the other week - had gone. The sitting room had a strange, alien smell that reminded me of the Glasgow Underground (The Subway) in my youth. We headed out into the weak sunshine that was beginning to show, wandering along the back lane for a bit of air. We ended up chatting to our oldest Dunoon friends - having a hing, in fact, over their garden gate. Somehow this became a party, during which we found ourselves ensconced on their patio with nibbles and a lovely bottle of wine that somehow became two bottles. The sun moved round, shining benignly on us, and then began to drop, and it was 8pm. For some reason we were all laughing uproariously. It was just great. Happily I'd planned on having fajitas for dinner, though it struck me as perilous to do fine slicing with a sharp knife in this jolly state. The long evening with a book, or perhaps the radio, or both, had turned into a somnolent couple of hours with music playing and the paper falling on the floor. Fantastic.

Blipping the Gas Man lying in the hearth waiting for his assistant to finish feeding the new flue down the chimney in the ruination of my sitting room. I'll be glad when it's over, but that was an unexpected delight to take our minds off it all. 

Night night!