TWO ROOMS

I haven't much felt like blogging lately, because I've really not been in that sort of a place.

As you may - or may not - have read in the exchanges underneath my last posting towards the end of last year, the words have simply not been coming and have, perhaps sadly, continued to not come ever since.

This has been something of a double-edged sword, however, because writing something new on an almost daily basis had become something of a stick to beat myself with, and my absence from such endeavours seems to have little troubled anyone very much, which does, at least, indicate the inflated opinion that I might have had about how significant my continuing to do so might have been.

In the meantime, however, the world, as you are no doubt aware (you are, after all, terrifically well-read and erudite people, dear readers and likely to be more than a little bit aware of what's happening in the world around you) has been a very mad and quite scary place whilst I've been off being sad and pathetic, and whilst I might once have had much to say about such things, so much has already been said by others that anything I might have had to add would have been, at best superfluous, and at worst, irrelevant, and perhaps, dare I say it, completely inappropriate.

Meanwhile, my free time has been somewhat swallowed up by certain necessities and a fixed timescale.

After our rodent infestation experiences towards the end of last year, we decided that the next phase of the refurbishment of our tiny little abode was long overdue and, having consulted with our local, friendly builder, Phase II (or is it technically Phase III or even Phase IV…?) was scheduled to begin in the middle of February, a time which, as the more astute of you will already have worked out, is now upon us.

As such, much of my free time lately - that which hasn't been squandered by early morning viewings of the "Complete Box Sets" of old telly that I acquired both before and after Christmas - or swallowed by being trapped in the house by snow and ice, has involved packing up boxes full of the mountains of junk that used to clutter just about every surface of the two rooms - a full forty percent of our living space that we plan to have refurbished, and then lugging the contents either upstairs (where we are now packed to the rafters), or to the storage unit several miles away which is, perhaps not surprisingly, now also packed to the rafters.

Some books - and other gubbins - have been donated to charity shops, and a seemingly endless supply of what can only be described as being utter rubbish has been transported to the tip, or carted away in black bin bags by our surprisingly cooperative council waste disposal operatives.

Anyway, as of ten o'clock in the evening on Sunday night, the two rooms were finally (finally!) clear for the first time in nearly two decades and, for once, seemed to be quite pleasant - if echoey and slightly battered-looking - spaces, and I have to start giving some consideration to addressing the clutter that remains to be sorted in the other sixty percent of the house, even though this year already feels like it's evaporating and like I've never really had a chance to stop, sit down, relax, and maybe compose a wordette or three for the entertainment of a few (mostly) strangers.

On Monday morning, the builders arrived and began knocking seven bells out of our tiny little homestead, so take a good long look, because it already doesn't look anything like this, and I'm not likely to have a functioning kitchen space for quite some time which might, along with all of the calorie-burning lugging of stuff that I've been doing, might not be the worst thing for my waistline, even if I do think that it's far, far too much for an enfeebled old man like I am to be doing.

So, after all that, here we find ourselves indulging in the gentle art of bloggery again, however fleetingly.

There may even be more to come… although I don't know when.