Tuesday 13 December 2022
My life is so completely different in rural Scotland compared to London. Yesterday’s activities, both planned and unplanned, largely involved physical labour, a selection of minor cuts and grazes, a lot of dirt and a need to repaint the stairwell.
I cleaned out the multi-fuel stove and surrounding area, which took ages. I took out two buckets of ash and poured them into the ash area, which messed up the lovely white frosty snow. As I figured it would be the last big coal-clean, I (foolishly) abandoned gloves to pick up some of the smaller bits of partially burnt coal and to pull some out of Henry (the vacuum cleaner). My hands were a coal and ash black never seen before. I didn’t really register how black my hands were, but it’s easy to identify where I put my hands, including on various patches of the pale walls.
Somewhere towards the end of the hearth-cleaning, I spotted a lorry at the bottom of the drive. I went out, having been told by Chris (who was out) that our two office chairs would be arriving about the time it was. A delivery man was struggling up the unpaved drive with a wheelie thing, on which was a pallet, on which were two large office chairs secured to the pallet by industrial-strength plastic wrap. The driver was very grumpy. Very grumpy. He didn’t think the trolley would get to the house, and anyway, he said, it was supposed to be a curbside drop-off. He did get it near the front of the house, not without constant complaining. He quoted the first part of our postcode, saying this was definitely not within that postcode. I said that twelve houses had the same postcode. His facial expression made it abundantly clear that wasn’t his point. He’d come from Selkirk and was heading to Hawick, both of which are about twenty miles away. He repeatedly pointed out that we are in the middle of nowhere. What could I say? He persisted though, clearly very pissed off with his delivery schedule. He told me he might as well drive to the moon and that in fact twenty-one miles to Hawick was further than the moon. He detached the trolley and I found myself standing next to a pallet with two plastic-wrapped chairs. Roughly minus three degrees. I could hear him continuing his rant, even over the rattling of the trolley over the frozen mud, as he disappeared down the drive. He clearly isn’t ever going to live further than the moon from a town.
Having found my Stanley knife (how good are they?), I kind of enjoyed slashing at the plastic to free the chairs. I don’t know how but I somehow managed to manoeuvre my enormous chair up the stairs and even round the corner of the stairs. That’s why the stairwell walls need repainting, ahem. I spent ages trying to lower the chair. No, not possible. You know how chairs that you can raise and lower need you to be sitting on them to raise or lower? Well, I eventually managed to find the adjustment lever (a handy instruction card formed part of the underside of the chair). I managed to get it up. Ridiculously high. I honestly had to jump off it to get down. And then I realised I couldn’t get it down without sitting on it. But I couldn’t get back onto it as A) it has five wheels and moves and B) it was too high. I had to move the BFG-suitable chair towards a cupboard so I could launch myself onto the chair by leaning on that. So it transpires that the chair I bought is a draughtsman’s chair, which I hadn’t realised means it’s very tall. So tall, it most definitely will not fit under the desk that still hasn’t been delivered. I carried it back downstairs later on, to see if it fit under Chris’s desk. It doesn’t. His choice of chair was far more suitable. I have now been looking at adjustable-height desks. So, who knows, wait three weeks for a desk, then two come along at once. It could well be a thing.
Then came another delivery, one of the four Velux blinds I had ordered. Still on a roll from cleaning the stove and dealing with the cling-wrapped chairs, I decided to affix the blind. Very simple, apparently, just fifteen minutes to fix the blind’s frame and, voila, a blind. The only blind that had arrived was the bathroom one, a pleated blind that you can lift up or pull down, or indeed both together. I saw lengths of stringy cord and gulped. I’m not good with tangles. Anyway, the instructions were entirely pictorial. The main issue was that I had to sit in the bath to fix the blind. It was awkward and not particularly comfortable (how do slippers get so dirty that the slightest bit of water reveals muddy water that then gets trodden all around the bath and the room?). However, to my surprise there was only one incident other than dropping the odd thing in hard-to-reach places. I had inadvertently got the top of my top attached to the tap. I then inadvertently turned the cold tap on and had a flush of cold water straight down my top. Very. Cold. Other than that, clear instructions, everything worked and fifteen minutes was probably spot on. Very pleased. And it works perfectly and the cords didn’t tangle. But I did have a wet, cold chest and a wet, cold top.
I also flattened yet more packaging, moved my study around, wildly hopeful that creating the space for my desk will magic its arrival, and did the minimal amount of work I needed to do. I also had an amazing walk in the frosty snowy hills, including what has become my pretty-much-daily patrol around the ‘grounds’ and around to the road to see how it’s looking. Yesterday, it was about minus six in the morning, today it was around minus eight. I have to drive today, which will be interesting. We do at least have a four-wheel-drive car with winter tyres fitted and a snow setting.
