Books and sheds

I woke up this morning later than usual and with a headache so I was glad that my job in London had been postponed yet again (although my bank balance isn’t too happy about it).  Then I went to make a cup of coffee and saw the cause of my headache, there were a quite few empty bottles sitting on the kitchen cabinet.  Last night was the inaugural meeting of our boater’s book club and a good night it was too.  Only four us at the first meeting, one member sent her apologies they’d high-tailed it to the canals before the forecast rain caused the EA to slap more Strong Stream notices on The Nene.

We read Tideline by Penny Hancock, a tale of the kidnapping of a fifteen year old and a spiral into madness.  Two liked, one disliked and one said it was not the sort of book she would have read but did enjoy reading it.  Probably the most surprising thing was that for the most of the evening we talked about the book and books with only a few deviations into unrelated subjects.  As we opened the fourth bottle of wine we agreed that we found it difficult to understand how women slid into alcoholism. So we’ll look forward to the next meeting and I’ll enjoy reading the chosen book when I remember what it is.

My next door neighbour is building a shed. He made use of a passing digger to dig out the foundations a few weeks ago.  We were grateful for the extra mud that was spread around because we really felt we didn’t have enough mud around here.  It meant that I could tramp lots of dirt in and make my white rug (which idiot lives on a boat and buys a white rug) become a sludge coloured rug all the sooner. Now he’s laid concrete foundations and is putting up the rest of it. I thought there seemed to be a lot of walls waiting to be erected (I think four is the usual number of walls for sheds) but that’s because there are two old sheds being revamped into one new shed. I wondered if he’d got some details wrong because as it was going up it looked as if he was going to have four walls two windows and no door.  I kept listening in case I heard cries for help when he was inside hammering the last panel in place and found he couldn’t get out.  The next time I went out a door had appeared in just the place one expects a door to be.  It was starting to look like a shed, not a thing of beauty, not even a well constructed shed but it was definitely a shed.

This morning the wind blew it down.