14:30 · the hot part
Yetty unpicks the season's knot in the spare rope, starting at one end and working for over an hour, and gets the last loop out at half past two: forty feet of good rope in one piece. Fizzy had said twice to cut it. Nobody makes a fuss, because by then everybody has forgotten it was a knot.
2 fluffs tell this minute. None of them saw the same one.
Then there was the knot.
The spare rope had been in a box all season and had become one solid lump roughly the size and the temper of a cat. Three fluffs had a go and gave it up. Yetty sat down on a crate in the sun with it and started at one end.
I came past and said, "Just cut it."
"There isn't any more rope."
So I took it to a crate in the sun round the side of the barn, where nobody was, and started at one end.
I want to describe this properly, because everybody was extremely nice about it afterwards and nobody has any idea what it was actually like.
It is not brave. It is boring. You find a loop. You follow it. You lose it. You find it again. Nothing visible happens for a very long time — forty minutes, an hour — and then the whole thing is suddenly looser everywhere at once, all at the same moment, and then it goes back to being boring again for another twenty.
There is no part of it that feels like progress while you are in it. That is the entire difficulty and it is the reason three fluffs put it down.
