We had 13mm rain overnight, which is half an inch in old money. That's useful, and means I needn't worry about recently planted primroses and suchlike for a few days, but won't have penetrated deep enough to be much help with trees, and is utterly irrelevant in the wider context of the drought. The bad news is that it will encourage more weeds to germinate. The dry spell held them in check, and I was making rapid net progress applying mulch to the borders.
The cleaning took a good part of the day. The Systems Administrator vacuumed and applied industrial quantities of limescale remover to the bathroom, and I wiped the kitchen down and washed floors in the kitchen and the hall. I tidied up assorted heaps of letters and magazines, partly by dint of consolidating them into piles on my desk in the study, and the SA consented to sort through the litter of old Love Film wrappers that have been accumulating by the TV for months. There are still cobwebs and patches of fluff that we've missed, but I'm too knackered to do anything about them now. We have until 11.00 or thereabouts tomorrow to make ourselves look presentable.
The object of all this domestic effort is not friends or relatives, but prospective housesitters. We have booked a holiday for this autumn, and are going to lash out and call the professionals in while we're away. What with the economic downturn and collapse in savers' rates, and the cat busting his leg last year, I have spent precisely two nights away from home since October 2010, and I'm looking forward to a holiday a lot. Really a lot. When we were City slickers we used to use an agency, which was painfully expensive but meant that cover was guaranteed. More recently when we have been away we've relied on private arrangements, which have worked, but there is always that niggling awareness in the back of the mind that if anything goes wrong in one's obliging friend's own life, such as illness, or a family crisis, or their car breaking down, that they might be unable to spend the week looking after our cats and chickens and pots.
Realising how few people we had to call upon made me feel quite socially inadequate, but there it is. My parents live a quarter of an hour's drive away, so that would be an hour's driving each day. My father is in his eighties and has been ill, and my mother doesn't drive, and they are already looking after their grandchildren before and after the school day. The Systems Administrator's brothers live in Northamptonshire and Kent. Our nearest neighbours are in their seventies at least, and the people next door to them are usually in London half the week. Our next neighbour is in his eighties, and the people down the lane look fit and energetic but we don't know them well enough to ask that big a favour. It is a lot of work, including watering the pots if the weather's warm. A close friend offered to step into the breach one time when it looked as though we might have a last minute problem, and I was deeply and eternally grateful, but she lives a good ten minute drive away and works in London four days a week, so how she'd cope I don't know. Other close friends live at least half an hour's drive away (in the SA's case in Hitchin and the Lake District), or have enough on their plates looking after their own families and homes, without being lumbered with mine for a week.
So the agency it is going to be. Even if the booked sitters have some crisis of their own, the agency will find somebody else. The cost is eye-watering, but peace of mind is assured. Or at least, it is as long as the sitters do what they're told. We once had a dreadful man who took it upon himself to cut back various shrubs wherever they overhung hard landscaped areas, and faced up the Chaenomeles under the kitchen window with an electric hedgecutter. I was younger in those days, and more inhibited about employing staff. Since then I have learned to be very explicit about the fact that all forms of gardening are off-limits, except for watering.
Part of the routine (and the expense) is that prospective sitters who haven't stayed in the property before come for an initial meeting when the sit is booked. This gives them a chance to back out if they can't stand the place or don't think they could cope (we did have one elderly couple who jibbed at the steps and the watering) and us a chance to reject anyone we think unsuitable. We haven't, yet, though I said I would never have the hedge cutter man again. If you reject the proposed sitters you still have to pay their travelling expenses and go through the whole process a second time with a fresh candidate, and we never have turned one down, though with hindsight I should have acted on my initial bad vibes about the hedge cutter vandal. As well as the pruning incidents his wife managed to tread chicken shit into the house as soon as she arrived, and when the main electricity switch tripped while we were away, they couldn't find it (it was right next to the fuse box) and they ran us up a bill calling out the electricity board, and when they went home they forgot a rice steamer they'd brought, which I had to post to them. Really they were not fit to be left in charge of someone else's house.
The form the agency sends you to fill in is rather daunting, since it asks about alarms, and swimming pools, and all sorts of things that our house doesn't have, and I used to feel that we weren't really grand enough to be using an agency. After the hedge cutting episode I had a long talk with them about what the house was actually like, and what we really needed, and since then they have been much better at sending us bookish people who aren't worried by a bit of mess, don't expect antiques or a swimming pool, and genuinely like animals. So tomorrow's candidates will probably be fine. But we still felt the need to make a good, or at least vaguely sanitary, first impression, hence the cleaning blitz. Now we are about to have a Chinese takeaway for supper, because the SA said it seemed a pity to cook on the clean Aga.
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