I’m waiting for the Builder. His name is Dave. This works well for me (being memoryly challenged) because most of the men I know are called Dave. So when I call a man on the phone I can just say ‘Hello Dave’. There does follow the problem of what I’m supposed to be talking about. I’ve decided to stick with the opening gambit of ‘Hello Dave, the roof is leaking.’
Dave the builder understands this. Dave my boyfriend understands this (or understands me sufficiently to ignore random phone overtures). All my Dave friends know me well enough to respond by hanging up.
I’m waiting for the builder. He’s supposed to be coming to fix the roof. The roof is leaking. Mostly I’m not all that very house proud. I’m successfully ignoring the fragrantly rotting front door, the musicality of the plumbing and the interesting angles my ceilings construe themselves into. But leaking roofs are not good. I’ve seen the television programmes.
It starts with a leaking roof. Then the timbers get wet rot and dry rot and rot. Then the wall falls down. Your previously (and possibly aristocratic) family is inconvenienced by the lack of wallage. They leave the stately pile for the suburbs. You stay in the stately pile living in the only room where it doesn’t rain, accompanied by your mêlée of cats. Years pass. A television crew turns up to your previously stately pile (now transformed to a pile) wanting to know why you didn’t get the roof fixed. Your only response by this stage is ‘Meow’.
I’m still waiting for the builder. This isn’t the first time. I suspect it won’t be the last.
I have decided to move the shed. Mostly because it is spoiling my view of the mountain. The mountain is much prettier than the shed and it doesn’t leak like the shed does. There are a number of problems involved. It isn’t a little shed, measuring about 3m x 10m, it is in fact a large shed. It was built sometime in pre-history of a solid wooden construction. It has been re-roofed in the not so distant past in an insubstantial plastic sort of way.
This isn’t the big problem. The big problem is all the stuff in the shed. What do I do with all the precious junk I have accumulated in the last 20 years? Items like surf boards, doors, desks, chairs, a fitted kitchen, thousands of tins of paint, another thousand tiles of no matching genre, plant pots, garden tools, a large assortment of bits of wood, sixty double glazing units that got mis-ordered when the house was re-glazed, and a number of wasps’ nests.
I’m a big fan of Scrapheap Challenge so I’m going to do Shedheap Challenge. The challenge is to make a new shed using only the items stored in the old shed in order that I might empty the old shed to make a new shed to store all the items in the shed.
I’ve been training to be a recluse. Which may be why no one has heard from me in such a long time. Or it could be the weather.
Being a recluse is considerably more difficult than I’d anticipated. Hence the training. The actual word recluse is derived from the Latin ‘recludere, which means "shut up"’. I read this on Wikipedia. The first problem becomes fairly obvious. This shutting up lark, although fine as far as it goes in terms of blogs, is quite tricky when it comes to shopping, asking neighbours to feed cats and answering difficult questions posed by cats. I’m hoping that talking to oneself, inanimate objects or foodstuff doesn’t count.
Having failed to find a proper school for potential recluses (or is that recluii?) or even a decent online resource I have been left with having to invent the training for myself.
I understand that a good recluse will try and stay away from people.
On Wednesday I had to go to work so I encountered a number of people. I was suitably grumpy and refused offers of coffee, chats about unpaid invoices and any further unpaid invoices. Funny how no one ever wants to chat about the invoices you’ve actually paid, which, at any given time must considerably outnumber the unpaid ones. I put this down to an unhealthy interest in current affairs.
On Thursday I managed to speak only to 2 cats, 6 plants, a hummus sandwich (only to mention how gorgeous it was), and my boyfriend. I’d like to point out here, that Dave, the boyfriend (we like to call the over 55s boys these days in order to appear younger and more girlish oneself) is also a recluse or at least a potential recluse with some outstanding exceptions we won’t go into. This was my best day this week.
On Friday I was all set to talk only to 2 cats, an undefined number of plants and probably a bowl of pasta when someone rang. I answered the phone, essentially breaking the first rule of reclusive-in-training but not having got over the first rule of motherhood and assuming that if the phone rings it’s a daughter with some very important crisis. It was neither. That was the earlier call that I’m not mentioning because it’s not relevant. It was bestest friend from school. Telling me that an old chum from school days was now Paul McCartney and there was a gig on in a park in Bath. I encountered over 2000 people. This has put my training back by approximately 743 years. But one of them was Paul McCartney and I always fancied him. However since he’s well out of my league training starts in earnest again tomorrow: 2 cats, an undefined number of plants and an intimate tête-à-tête with a particularly nutty muesli.
I have made a decision. One of those life-changing yes-now-I-like-olives of decisions. Some are born decisive, some achieve decisiveness, and others have decisiveness thrust upon them. I fall into all three categories but mostly at the moment I’m having it thrust upon me. And perhaps not in an alluring sort of way.
For the last little while, or year, I have been working every afternoon as a child-minder, house-keeper, ironic-ironer sort of person. This was very jolly and I got paid every week into my bank account so that, in the usual way of the world, the council, utilities and suppliers of totally necessary chocolate cake could remove it from the aforementioned depository. Redundancy is being thrust upon me. Possibly because the children are all grown up, the house has decided to become independent and the iron has made a bid for freedom in eternally lumpy wrinkled sort of places.
I have made a decision. A career change. I am going to be a writer. Now, this may sound familiar. As I am actually already a writer. This time, however I have decided to become a PAID writer!
All my writerly friends will probably wonder what in the world I’m talking about. Surely we do it for the love of the craft, our addiction to verbiage and our attempts to break the world record for Rejection Letters from Publishers Received? That was when we had other incomes, or husbands or faith. Now we are not so well endowed or faithful. A bit like husbands. I have a cunning plan to prostitute my art. I have been on the internet. These are the jobs that writers can do if they really want:
Blogging about things you have never heard of (some education will come free with this).
Ghost-writing stories of people whose lives really make the rest of ours look like a energy-saving lightbulb.
Advertising copy for selling stuff we may never have heard of (again good sideline in education.
Writing random things in the hope that someone will host a related advert. I can already actually do this with this blog and you may all note the lovely ads.
It’s happened at last. I’ve been discovered. Right now as we speak I’m being filmed as a maniac late-night internet addict. Hammer house of horror woman in front of back-lit laptop.
This is probably not how I wanted to be portrayed. Still. I’ve been discovered. Discoverees cannot be choosers.
My discoverer found me via my penchant, or previous penchant, for internet dating. The Guardian sent me an email. This is almost what it said:
‘Just stumbled across your wonderfully wise and witty blog. Hope you'll submit your stories to the Guardian Soulmates competition over the next few days: there are lots of prizes and no limit to how many times you can enter. The deadline's next Tuesday.’
That was quite few Tuesdays ago. More Tuesdays than can be contained in a small red shoe. I did as suggested. After all, who can resist being called wise and witty? Or prizes. Or Tuesdays?
I had many return emails saying ‘Yay! We are publishing your wise and witty piece.’ ‘Boo we are not sending you prizes!’. Then one said ‘Yay! We are coming to film you!’ I’m being filmed by a real documentary film maker. Not just my cat leaning on the record button.
Filming is an interesting process. It’s a method of distorting time. Not in the way one might like. The film is going to be 3 minutes long. Not long even in terms of cooking noodles, creating works of mediocre fiction, dates, dried fruit of any proclivity or a good night in. However filming is not like life. Filming is long and has numerous déjà vu moments and again and just again because they haven’t turned the camera on or haven’t got a valid battery or it seems just not to be in just exactly the exactly right light.
Filming in public is akin to trying to cook a noodle soup whilst waiting for form of a public transport. You keep getting interrupted. An old man wanders through shot making gentle farting noises. A group of lads decide it’s their turn to be a star (whereas actually it was mine). A toddler makes a lovely face into camera – didn’t understand what the objection to that was because frankly she was a lot more cuter than me and was liable to be an internet dater in due course. After all 50% of single people do. And 20% of people are single and another 80% of people wish they were single and therefore, given the maths, the small girl with the pink bow and the shoes that were mini Jimmy Choos will definitely be a future internet dater.
Meanwhile, back on the shoot, a man with a dustpan and brush tells us we can’t shoot here. Not where he sweeps. We might produce dust, small pieces of paper or possible litter the area with awkward sound effects.
Filming is an interesting process. It’s a method of distorting time. The film is going to be 3 minutes. As yet we have been filming for 3 weeks, 3 days, 3 hours and 3 minutes, 4 minutes, 5 minutes … It is not a way of making your life longer. This could be a worse hazard than smoking, chocolate cake, never getting off the sofa and Smarties all put together on a very sunny Spanish afternoon with no factor 50.
We await the results with nervous anticipation. I am applying sunblock.
The book Soulmates: Adventures in Online Dating featuring a great deal of my disastrous exploits is supposed to be out for Valentines day. Although I have been discovered I’m not going to be famous as we were required to use a nom de plume for our entries in the book. Just so as to make things clear for any innocent readers of the book I’ve used the nom de plume ‘Nom de Plume’ in case anyone thought it was me.
I have a room dubbed ‘office’. Not a complete misnomer as the all three of us that run our corporate empire (the size of a small Caribbean island on a miniature globe seen through the wrong end of a telescope) forgather here. It was a tad chilly. I turned up the radiator. It started raining.
I have another room above the aforementioned room dubbed ‘bedroom’. Being a woman of logic I assumed that the rain was originating from bedroom. I lifted many a floorboard to discover a faulty pipe stop valve. I put a small Tupperware container in place.
Being a woman of logic I realised that this was not a long-term solution. Tupperware seldom is. So in due course I embarked upon a voyage of fixing. This is what happened:
In order to drain the heating system I had to open the back door. In order to open the back door I had to apply a small hammer. The room became chillier. I drained the system. The whole house became chillier. I removed the valve and fiddled with pipe connections. I refilled the system. The one rain became two. I placed two small Tupperware containers.
Tupperware escalation is not good. I drained the system. The whole house became chillier. I fiddled with pipe connections. I refilled the system. I removed the Tupperware.
The next morning the house remained chillier. No radiators were working. With a wandering Tupperware I removed air. The house became warmer. Except the office. I turned up the radiator.
It’s time to fess up. It’s tidier than fessing down. Although cunningly disguised as a friend of a friend of a person quite likely to be a friend, I met him on the internet.
I know.
But everyone’s doing it. All the friends of friends of people one is quite likely to know. It has real advantages over real life. Things like:
We all know why we’re here.
It’s possible to talk to his/her photograph without ever having had the painful experience of having a photograph given to you as a token of love and then just being left with the token when the photographee has wandered off.
We can pretend to be better/wittier/saner/realer/less menopausal people without the real better/wittier/saner/realer people actually finding out that you’re sitting there having a hot flush.
There is no one to ask if you are really better/wittier/saner/realer. (Soulmates haven’t cottoned on to the whole reference thing which is the usual requirement of the matchmaker) (aside from being in those cute slidy boxes)
It’s nothing to do with one’s mother’s conception of who a nice boy/girl would be.
It’s possible to judge people on purely spurious basises like – the quality of their punctuation, whether they’re capable of making it through an entire form-filling process, and how they look in a photograph obviously taken in a moment of desperation as they came to the bit in the form when asked to upload a photo (hence the lion-king pyjamas). Their fondness for orange vegetables.
There is a great deal of interest in the subject of Guardian Soulmates. I have just designated myself in the role of spurious Soulmate expert. Experts, after all, are only people who know stuff that is basically unknowable. Questions like why? How? What? And most of all with whom? All of these, and probably many more questions, I might address in forthcoming posts. Next exciting episode, coming to a screen near you – First Contact – what really happened, what might have happened, and carrot soup.
