Happy 5th July: or, God but I love our friends

In an age-old solution to a twenty-first century problem - oh noes, my machinery is broken! - Morgan's family have lent us their KitchenAid, and taken ours away to poke about in its interior and see what's what. This just in: people are lovely.

Also, Morgan is Nearly Two. She told me so.

We are late and slow this morning, can't think why: but the other machineries are doing the first round of post-party clean-up; the wife is napping in her chair, yay; and I am off to the farmers' market to see what's what. Weirdly, there is almost no food left from yesterday. People ate it. People: lovely, but incomprehensible. (Apart from the chilli in the six-quart pot, and three rounds of bread buns through the day, I mostly made my favourite grilling thing, a vasty chunk of pork smoked slowly for hours'n'hours. There is precious little even of that left, hey-ho.)

Cleaner

I did once want to write a novel called Cleaner, which would not be a genre novel at all; it would be about a runaway boy who turns up in a Georgian square (not in the least unlike Summerhill Square in Newcastle, where I spent much of my happiest adult time, though I never actually lived there) and gets absorbed into the community and cleans their houses and and and. Sort of a bildungsroman with extra soap.

Obviously I never did that (tho' I still could!), but I do kinda feel like today has been all cleaning all the time. So far I've done two dishwasher loads plus a heap of pans and such that couldn't go through the machine; four loads of laundry; and I still haven't finished even in the kitchen. Perhaps I should've done that thing where you clean the house before the party, too? Then it mightn't have been such an effort after... (Seriously, I remember being genuinely baffled by that when I was a young man. "You know you're going to have to clean up after, people make such a mess; why on earth would you want to clean up before? It just doubles the work!" "Chaz dear, do you really want your friends to see your house in its usual state?" "They're my friends! They come round all the time! They've all seen the house in its usual state!" etc. Sometimes I think we developed rationality purely and solely to argue the inarguable. I shoulda bin a lawyer.)

I've even cleaned the shelf in the mudroom, to instate Morgan's KitchenAid (it's legit, but does anyone in any context actually say "instate"? Or is it a lost word, retained only in memory, in "reinstate"? I had to look it up, to check it was legit; I do not believe I have ever heard it. Or used it, before this).

There is (much) more yet to do, and Dr Amy is coming round soonish to stick needles in the cats, for we are croo-ell; but right now I am going to stop a bit, and drink this rather good glass of Sauvignon Blanc without even thinking about anything more. Karen was telling me earlier, a depressingly large number of people would genuinely rather give themselves mild electric shocks than be left alone with their thoughts. Fortunately, neither one of us is among 'em.

What's better than the Best Game Ever?

Well, duh. The Best Game Ever with String, obviously.

(For those not in the know, the Best Game Ever is changing the bedsheets. With cats. Either one, or both together. But once the bottom bedsheet is safely emplaced - instate, we like to say - without a cat beneath it, then whichever cat is currently on top of it? Is going to be extra enchanted by added string, I am just sayin'. Also bleedin', I am just bleedin'. But only a little. Baz has claws, and string must be pinned down firmly.)