My wife has taken to throwing open the curtains at 7am in a bid to seize the day. Most mornings this creates no appreciable difference in the amount of light in the room; it’s only the noise of the curtains sliding back that wakes me.
I think my wife is missing the point of this time of the year: there is nothing to seize. If we didn’t have to eat, we could just stay in bed until February. But the curtain flinging is partly her way of demonstrating that the decision to move to this bedroom – our middle son’s until he moved out in September – was the correct one. And it’s also because the birds are up this early, and the windows of the new bedroom face the bird feeders.
“Look!” my wife says, pointing at the barely discernible silhouettes of birds flitting through bare branches. “There are three finches on my feeder!”
“Hmm,” I say, rolling over.
“And a dunnock,” she says.
“There was a puffin on there the other day,” I say.
“No there wasn’t,” she says.
“I’ve seen it before,” I say. “It comes when you’re not here.”
“Hah!” my wife says. I know this noise has nothing to do with me: it’s just the triumphant note she sounds whenever a parakeet fails to overcome our anti-parakeet bird feeder.
I get up and look out the window. The sun has not yet risen over the terraced rooflines to the east, but the sky is beginning to pale. I can see our garden wall emerging from the shadows, newly repaired. Unfortunately, so can my wife.
“You need to put up a new trellis there,” she says. “Fill in that gap.”
“It’s on my list,” I say.
In fact my list only extends to the purchasing of the correct stuff: two trellis panels, three fence posts, three post holders. If I get that right, I figure the actual installation can be postponed until the new year. Even the shopping trip can wait until Saturday. Unless, I think, today is Saturday.
“In which case,” I say, “what am I doing up?”
“Bad luck, arsehole!” my wife shouts. I’m pretty sure she’s talking to the parakeet.
The trip to the DIY store does not go well. They have the correct sized trellis sections, but no posts or post-holders.
“I knew this whole day was a mistake,” I say, pushing a large flatbed trolley containing a single lightbulb.
“Can’t you just order all of it online?” my wife says.
“Yes,” I say. “But I could have done that from bed.”
Back home, the online version of the same DIY store I have just left is awash with posts – posts of every length and thickness. I have to go out and measure the wall again to make sure I order the right size.
The repair job has been, at my behest, a quick fix: just the top three brick courses re-laid. The wall still leans badly. I have been assured that, given its suburban Victorian provenance, it will have no foundations to speak of. One section – the site, perhaps, of an old gate – is only a single brick thick. The full reconstruction of the wall would be a protracted and costly undertaking I am not likely to live long enough to appreciate; not even if I threw open the curtains every morning to admire it.
“For those reasons, I don’t want to put any extra stress on the wall,” I say. “I need the kind of post holders you can pound into the ground.”
“Do I have to listen to this?” my wife says. “Just press Purchase.”
On the morning of the delivery the dispatcher rings to say they do not have any trellis sections in stock.
“OK,” I say, thinking: yes you do. I saw them on Saturday.
“We looked everywhere,” she says. Except the aisle, I think.
The driver, when he arrives with my posts, is apologetic.
“You can try reordering, and see what date they give you,” he says.
“I’ll bide my time,” I say. For some reason, he thinks this is hilarious.
But I don’t bide my time. I drive directly to the DIY store where, just as I remembered, they have an embarrassment of trellis sections. I select two, pay, and take them home.
“So that’s everything?” my wife says.
“That’s all of it,” I say. Left alone with my building supplies, I realise there is enough daylight left to complete the project: new year, new trellis.
Instead, I take a picture of the empty bird feeder and then go to my office to see if I can figure out how to Photoshop a puffin on to it.
