My hero

March 8, 2012

NOT even my best friends would call me tidy. Living in one 20ft by 7ft6in space for six weeks requires a formidable degree of organisation, which I’m struggling to acquire despite David having carefully created storage spaces for everything.

Jars, utensils, clothing, books – all must be returned to their allotted place after use EVERY SINGLE TIME.  Otherwise the process of making a simple meal can leave the whole place in chaos. There just aren’t enough surfaces to leave things lying around. And I’m constantly losing stuff – though that may have more to do with my short-term memory, which is sadly lacking.

Yesterday we actually washed our very dusty vehicle, tidied up, cleaned the bathroom etc and hung the dog’s bedding out to air. Within hours Glen, still damp from a walk on the beach, had sprinkled a layer of sand on the floor and his blanket, the bathroom was jammed with carrier bags full of groceries from a trip to the big Carrefour in Huelva, and the long bench seat was occupied by an assortment of books, binoculars, a backpack, my handbag, a beanbag and a pile of clean washing.

The poor dog is constantly being ordered between ‘bed’, ‘front’ – meaning the floor alongside the driver’s seat – and ‘chair’ as we try to work round him. We left him outside off his tether briefly yesterday and he shot off across the site in pursuit of a cat, so we won’t make that mistake again.

First thing this morning saw me buried under a pile of bedclothes while David was rolling about on the mattress clutching a can of WD40 and a bag of clothes pegs. You may well ask … but nothing exciting, I’m afraid.

I was finding it impossible to lift the bed back up to the ceiling in the mornings. David’s investigations - which involved pegging back the surrounding curtain - revealed that the mechanism needed oiling, so while he sorted that out I did some more laundry.  Now it works like a dream, and David has been renamed Bricoman, after the French DIY chain.