Clean, bright, and slightly oiled

We have had another week of Tony as houseman, which, again, has gone very well. There was no point in doing the sitting room, drawing room and so forth since nobody has entered them since last week, so he was invited to apply the military mind to the linen cupboard. This was rather a success. Towels, duvet covers, flat sheets, fitted sheets, pillow cases, square pillow cases and oddments have all been successfully sorted out; spare pillows (usable) distinguished from old pillows (destined for the dump), and so on. It’s all unbelievably tidy, squared off and generally organised. One result of the whole enterprise was the emergence of a Log Cabin quilt of respectable age we had entirely forgotten the existence of – it’s not so much a quilt as a quilt top just backed onto a sheet, and neither of us can remember where, or when, we bought it. But it’s lovely; the prevailing tones are indigo blue, light coffee brown, and white. Our current duvet cover is palest café au lait and white stripes, and the old quilt looks very nice over it: if we only had blue mocha-ware mugs on the mantlepiece rather than horrid silver candlesticks and a nautilus shell, we would justabout qualify for a page in Mr P---'s book. Miss Kit looks very nice as part of the ensemble too, being reddish-brown, but we have had to explain to her that she is not Artless because, basically, pedigree cats aren’t.  Artless cats, I suspect, are grey and black tabbies, or ginger. Miss Dog, meanwhile, has a grievance of more substantial dimensions – she was dragged upstairs by the collar this evening and forced into the bath. The Labrodoric natural oils had got well out of hand: she was horrid, and has been horrid for some time, to the extent that a penumbra of odour has preceded her into the room. Washing is very wounding to the canine spirit, alas, but she has her ways of getting her own back. And it has to be said, quite a lot of leftover pasta has gone a fair way to reconciling her to her  lot.