Sigh.  Exactly what I was afraid would happen is happening, once I stopped blogging every day—which is that I’m always going to do it again tomorrow.  Mind you, there are things going on.  Including that I keep frelling collapsing, and if I have any spare energy I should probably give some member(s) of the hellmob or other a better hurtle than they’ve probably had today.  Whereupon I will be too tired to do anything so frivolous as write a blog and furthermore I’ve been knocking myself out for way too much of the last week writing frelling COPY for a big wodge of my backlist that is going to be rereleased soonish, and about which I will give you all the details as soon as there’s a schedule to give you the details of.  BUT TRY TO IMAGINE HOW MUCH I HATE NOT MERELY WRITING COPY FOR MY OWN STUFF, which regular readers of this blog are well aware of, BUT WRITING IT FOR A WHOLE FRELLING STACK OF MY BOOKS.*  No, don’t try to imagine, it would be very bad for you.

But for a further graphic example of things going on, the twice frelling put off** new boiler installation finally happened yesterday.  YAAAAAAY.  Well, sort of, barring the gaping hole in my bank balance that is letting in a frigid blast of hostile air despite the mild September we’re having locally and the war zone the army of two left behind.  WORKMEN.  ARRRRRRGH.***  And where did all the frelling red dirt come from?  What is this, Louisiana/Mississippi/Alabama/Georgia/South Carolina?†  My entire house is sheeted in a thin, less than delightful film of powdery red dirt.††  So charming.  The bathroom was hazy with it Monday night and the excitingly renovated linen cupboard looked like something out of a bad fantasy film:  Evil Witch’s Grotto.  Put the red cellophane over the lens.   I could feel the cloud clinging to my skin as I climbed out of my (hot:  definitely hot) bath last night.  I don’t want to think about the newly-slightly-red-tinted condition of my lungs.  SO CHARMING.

The army of two showed up as promised at 10 am and were not early, so we got off to a good start—which is to say I was not only dressed but I’d had enough caffeine to be able to figure out how to get the front door key out of my pocket and open the door with it—this pleasing punctuality aside from the fact that if they hadn’t shown up as most recently promised I would have had to hunt them down and kill them because I am VERY TIRED of having my entire bathroom in cardboard boxes . . . not only because I can’t find anything but because there’s already no available floor space at the cottage because of the immediate distressing results of moving from a somewhat larger house to a somewhat smaller house, and the first time Joachim cancelled it was already the morning of the day he was supposed to come so I had sensibly already pulled everything out of the cupboard AND PUT IT IN BOXES.  You have no idea what you’ve managed to wedge into a rather small airing cupboard, rather full of boiler and hot water tank, till you have to take it all out and put it in boxes AND PUT THE BOXES SOMEWHERE.†††

Let me make this short, which the day was not.‡  Joachim and adjutant arrived.  They arrived with amazing amounts of kit, which meant I stayed downstairs with the Aga—which they had to turn off, so that was not satisfactory from a keeping-tea-hot perspective—because I couldn’t get into my office with the upstairs hallway JAMMED with screwdrivers‡‡ and winches and a small backhoe, and I didn’t like to decamp to Third House when they kept asking me things like, where is the gas line?, which I could have told them over the phone but not so they could find it without serious excavation‡‡‡, or where is the nearest plumbers’ supply house?  When they didn’t have a spare of something that just broke.  Oh.

They were due to clear off by three in the afternoon.  Four latest.  THEY WERE THERE TILL SIX THIRTY.  But I’m looking on the bright side.  They only destroyed one window screen and a rather good fuchsia, although I’m hoping the latter will recover.  They did attempt to clean up after themselves.§  They were polite.§§  And while the additional space in the airing cupboard may be a bit of a bust there is definitely more space in the attic where the holding tank came out.  And I haven’t seen any bats emerging from the new holes in the ceiling . . . but I’d better get Atlas to patch them before the bat mums come home to the largest pipistrelle nursery in Hampshire next spring.

And I do (still) have hot water.  But I had hot water before.  The crucial moment comes later in the season when I try to turn the central heating on for the first time. . . . §§§

* * *

* Especially old ones where I may actually have to read a bit here and there to make it likelier I get it right.  There’s very little worse than flipping frustratedly through something you yourself wrote because you’re CONVINCED that this or that thing happened and it has to have happened before/after this or that other thing, didn’t it?  DIDN’T IT?  MAYBE IT WAS IN SOME OTHER BOOK NOOOOOOOOO??  Arrrrrrgh.  How to feel really, really stupid without even any recourse to maths.^

That’s aside from the nooooo I didn’t really use that cringe-making metaphor did I?  I didn’t really allow the plot to do that did I? I didn’t really name that character that, did I?^^  Why didn’t I grow up to be a mechanic?^^^

^ Hey, I don’t hate maths like I used to+ but all those clever maths books I like reading in the bath?  I read the story or the set up or the problem or the joke or something and go, oooooh, cool . . . and then I look up the answer in the back of the book.

+ Unless there’s something about money involved in which case I hate it worse.  Money is a stupid system.  Let’s find another one.  Which may or may not be maths based.  I vote for not.

^^ That’ll be one of the names the story didn’t give me, that I had to choose.  Brrrrrr.

^^^ Because no one in his, or her, right mind would hire me.  Mercy Thompson would laugh till she did herself an injury.  So would Munch Mancini.

** Due to what sounded like a pretty genuine family emergency and resultant critical shortage of childminders.  Or maybe Joachim just uses hire-a-kid for verisimilitude.

*** Okay, the really good part?  No builder’s cracks.

† I know there’s really RED red dirt in the American South somewhere because I remember being amazed by it.  I just don’t remember where I was at the time.^

^ MAYBE IT WAS IN SOME OTHER BOOK NOOOOOOOOO?

†† Okay, it’s probably brick dust.  That’s not nearly so romantic.

††† The irony is that one of the things he seduced me with is the fact that there would be more ROOM in my small airing cupboard because the new boiler is an on-demand so . . . no tank.  Well.  Sort of more room.  Because of where the new thing is hung and where its dashboard is there’s not hugely more room than there was when there was a tank in there the size of a small nuclear silo.^  The best thing about the new gold-plated^ whatsit is that there is no hideously complex control panel for the end user—the dashboard on the thing itself is for professionals—the frelling wall panel for the shivering householder on my old one was diabolical.  You had like six columns^^^ and you had to choose the right button in each of the six columns to get what you wanted.  The permutations are . . . mathematically intimidating.  And this is one of the few occasions when the right answer is not ‘chocolate’.  THE NEW ONE YOU JUST TURN THE HOT TAP ON OR THE THERMOSTAT UP.  There is NO control panel.  I could almost talk myself into it being worth the money.#

^ You could still run out of hot water if you topped up your cooling bath too often.  Hey, it’s an exciting knitting magazine!  Double sized with pull outs!  I want to finish reading!

^^ At this PRICE?  It better be gold-plated.  I think I was promised diamond encrusted.  Maybe there are diamonds once I get the red dirt cleaned off. +

+ Furthermore it’s STICKY.  It doesn’t come off EASILY.=

= See?  It is clay.  It’s not brick dust.

^^^ Hot, cold, yes, no, left, right, octopus and Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

# Although this is one of those Where Did We Go Wrong moments.  The furnaces and hot water of my childhood were like this.  You could go down into the basement and stare at a couple of glass tubes with motor oil or magma or something moving slowly back and forth in them but generally speaking you turned the thing on or off upstairs and it worked and when it didn’t work you called a plumber.  You couldn’t programme it to turn on for seventeen minutes February 3rd, 2044, no, but I do not consider this facility worth the misery at 3 a.m. tonight when you just want a bath.  If one of the six columns had ‘hurtle the hellmob’ as an option I’d reconsider, but I have yet to see a boiler out on the trot with a lead extruding from its input valve.  Yaay retro.  Yaay primitive.  Yaay HOT BATHS ON DEMAND.

‡ And I have to go to bed in order to get up FRESH and SPRINGY and ATHLETIC and ready to go on mashing the attic at Third House.  The backlist comes home next Monday whether I’m ready or not.

‡‡ One of which they left behind.  The shank on it is about three feet long.  I don’t want to know.

‡‡‡ It’s in the greenhouse.  Nuff said.  Where the tap to turn the water into the house off is worse however because I hadn’t thought to clear that cupboard out.  Sigh.

§ I only found half a dozen screws, presumably to keep the screwdriver company.  As well as a lot of adherent red dirt.

§§ Even if Joachim can’t stop calling his elderly female clients ‘darling’.  I think possibly on account of my eruptions on the subject of control panels he thinks I need looking after.

§§§ I don’t want so mild a winter I don’t ever turn it on.  I want the slugs and snails and the black spot and the aphids and the red lily beetle to die.