Cleaning Day.

It has been raining on and off all day so I have spent the whole day indoors. Today I gave the big bookshelf in the sitting room its annual clean, taking down all the books, dvds and videos and giving them a wipe before replacing them on the shelves which also get a wash. Before he went out Peter culled another load of books from the shelves for me to give to the charity shop so now I have started to bring down my collection of Tolkien and LOTR related books which I have been keeping in a chest in our bedroom. Because I was a little worried that the books might stay damp after being wiped we put the central heating on for the whole evening! Bliss. (But now some of the radiators are not coming on even though we had everything cleared and checked in the summer so we may have a few cold rooms when everyone comes down.) I got carried away with my cleaning spree and washed every hard surface in the sitting room so now it is nearly ready for our visitors. Tomorrow I'll get out the beeswax and polish all the natural wood furniture. Peter had to drive over to Winkleigh to pick up a t-piece for the flue at the back of the wood burner as ours has rusted out. He spoke to the shop first to check out prices and when he told them that the same parts were 40% cheaper on-line they suddenly dropped their price from £150 to £95. He has almost finished remaking the doors so soon we should have a working refurbished wood burner. It was as I was happily wiping things down that I thought how thankful I am to have a ready supply of water. So many people in the world do not have access to clean water and I remember from last year when our bore hole pump froze and tripped out, how awkward it was to have to fill bottles with clean water at school and how many buckets of water we fetched from the stream to flush the toilets. And that was a minuscule difficulty compared to the millions of people who have to walk miles to fetch any sort of water at all.