Old-Fashioned Fruitcake
If there’s one thing I enjoy doing, it’s moving the furniture. Plotting future moves is almost as much fun.
Earlier this year I cooked up a delicious plan in which work desks (2) would be moved out of the living room into the kitchen, and the dining table would be moved into the living room, where it could enrich its life by doubling as a sewing table, writing table, games table, etc, etc, without being surrounded by cold air (the kitchen faces south-east) and the smells of cookery.
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There was a time when I was seriously considering becoming a nun. Then I met the Caped Gooseberry, and it became clear to me that this was not the path my life was meant to take. (Glad I got that clear before we got engaged, unlike Jane Christmas.)
This past week, it became clear to me that I might not have made a very good nun. To be frank, after the first day or two, it was chaos. Picture me, realizing it was time for a pray and finding myself in a tree waving loppers around. (Turns out, you can pray in a tree.)
The Wound of Words (draft 2.2) has now been despatched to the lovely people who volunteered to be beta readers, and I… what am I going to do?
I’ll be carrying on with the Grand Productivity Experiment, but doing less writing work and a lot more house and garden work. Especially garden work.
There’s the redcurrant to prune (at last!), the mighty Balrog to hack back again (the shed porch disintegrated and collapsed under its weight this year), and the dozens of poles shooting out the top of the apple tree like some sort of living candelabra to slice off.
And once I’ve done all that (no doubt with the assistance of the Caped Gooseberry’s superior musculature), it’s on to the potting, the planting out and the weeding.
Inside, for those inevitable days of Much Water, there’s pruning of another sort to be done (aka decluttering), and a truly remarkable quantity of mending to work my way through.
