Wednesday 4 January 2023
A year ago today, I started my novel. I would really like to be starting another one today. I last did anything on/for my manuscript on 17 November 2022, the day before we moved. I had expected to start submitting it to agents the first week of December, then pausing for Christmas and new year. I feel irritation and guilt that I haven’t been working on it.
However, I am mildly confident that an end to my massively extended pause is in sight. Today is Wednesday and I have every reason to think that by the end of this week my study will be as good as it can be with what I have and I will feel ready to start sending it off and I will also get a move on with posting these blogs. I’ve hardly posted any. I do not like editing photos on a laptop without a mouse or keyboard, or a desk, and anyway the internal mouse of my laptop has disappeared, seemingly without trace, since we got back here. I am genuinely looking forward to getting on with living here and doing my normal stuff.
Yesterday, with help from Chris, the newly-painted bed frame was installed in my study and is now transformed into a bed frame and looks significantly better than I expected. Very annoyingly, one component is missing, but fortunately on the temporary, smaller wheel-out frame (it’s a truckle bed), so I can at least assemble everything. A new mattress is currently on its way, the original one is a defective trampoline of springs (surely that’s a collective noun for bed springs?!). Once that’s all put together and a few other things moved around and put away, my room will feel as ready as it can be.
I still haven’t set my desktop PC up properly though as there are no sockets close enough to plug it in. This house has sockets everywhere, far more than I’ve ever seen in a house. I like to sit at a desk and at least be able to see out a window and in an ideal world my back will be against the wall rather than the desk. So my enormous desk takes up more room than necessary by being forward of a sloping wall but it was a waste of the one non-sloping wall (other than the one with the doorway) to put my desk there. That sloping wall has one socket, but at one end and too far away. My latest problem is that I have no extension cable. I didn’t pack any of the many we have in London as I knew there were sockets everywhere. We bought one the other day but it turns out that two metres isn’t long enough to reach without being dangerously taut. I feel challenged from so many places. I have never had so much to deal with as in this house from this move, but I have never bought a house, never lived in the middle of nowhere and I’ve also never felt that I have contributed so much to a home, making it work for us. And, slowly but surely, it is working for us.
We put up another couple of pictures yesterday, moved some chairs around, put out a few ornaments. I can’t believe we’re still working on the house, but I’m going to be a bit lost when we have done everything we can.
I had a walk yesterday, my ‘patrol’ route and a bit further. I only walked about 3,000 steps (I have long been a 10,000+ daily walker) but in that time, far more so than I would have expected, I got drenched. I mean the kind of drenched I haven’t been in years. Just as I was walking the last bit along the road to the house, I saw a distinctive car, which belongs to the only two people we know (other than the neighbour). They stopped, opened the window and we had a quick hello. It was at that point I appreciated how wet and bedraggled I both looked and felt. Never have I been so glad of a pair of waterproof trousers tucked into my wellies, all sense of style aside.
Today, once the mattress is installed, I will maybe get my room in order, I have quite a lot of paperwork to deal with (for which I will need to stretch out the inadequate extension lead) and it would be good to get the photos done and text edited a bit so I can post another blog. I am still posting about the coal fire days, which now seem a very long time ago. Thankfully.