FLEDGING BLUE TITS

Well, that swallowed up some time… Two and a half hours of a Thursday evening to be exact… meaning that, when we did get around to eating, it involved nothing but a swift bowl of cereal forming the main meal of the day.

Ah well…! Perhaps my waistline will forgive me…?

Perhaps I ought to explain…?

Losing that huge chunk of the evening, which we both found kind of surprising, was down to those pesky "Red Button" webcams which I told you about the other day (http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/springwatch-for-breakfast.html). We arrived home from work and switched on the TV, and it was still tuned to the same settings that it had been in the morning, meaning that the webcams were still there, and they were showing the contents of a nesting box containing either eight or nine Blue tit chicks huddled together but, as the captions kept reminding us, on the very brink of fledging.

Sure enough, between the feeds, and the bouts of sudden silence from all the chirruping, every so often one of them would poke its beak out through the little hole and take a good look at the great big wide world beyond, give its wings an experimental flutter, and look pretty much ready to pack its bags and leave home, despite the gathering gloom and chill of a typical spring evening.

Having just sat ourselves down to watch this spectacle "for a few minutes" we found, in the great tradition of those "Big Brother" overnights we've been told about, that two and a half hours had passed, that we were suddenly feeling very sleepy, and those chicks looked as if they were never going to leave as they huddled together closely with all their siblings for what will probably be the last time in their little lives.

Or perhaps they'd been primed so that they would choose the most "media friendly" moment to do it, and schedule it to happen during the evening's live broadcast so that the presenters could gush and coo and look as if they'd planned a special treat especially for us, the humble viewers.

Instead of suffering that, we went to bed, fully expecting to find an empty nest the next morning.

However, at four-thirty the next day (I told you I was an idiot…), I booted up the TV again and found that they were still there although, as it turned out, not for very much longer. As I sat there, tapping away at my emails and so forth, the first one went for it at 5.52am, and I was able to dash upstairs and wake my Beloved so that she got to see the rest of them leave during the next half hour or so.

The last one was a worry, though, given that it looked ad if its wings were not quite ready and, having clung on to the hole for a few moments, partook of a vertical rather than a horizontal launch.

And then they were gone, the fledglings had flown the coop (an expression that always reminds me of Jo Grant leaving "Doctor Who" when I was about nine…), and the nest was left bare (but for the parasites which were left behind), and suddenly all of the excitement turned to melancholy and I began to understand (in a small way) what it must feel like for parents to walk around an empty house when their children have left home.

The natural world… and the natural order of things… You really can't beat it, can you…?

So anyway, now I'm wondering what will become of those little darlings now that they have broken out into the big, bad world. I'll never know, of course, but, for two or three hours, they were little television stars and the very centre of our world.

IDIOT

Idiot…!

Idiot, idiot, idiot!

Idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot!

Idiot!

Idiot!

Idiot!

Don't talk to me…

Don't listen to me…

Pay no attention to me whatsoever…

Because…

I am…

Most definitely…

A total…

And utter…

IDIOT!!!!!

(I can't believe that I was such an idiot…)

SPRINGWATCH FOR BREAKFAST

Once again, I have been persuaded that watching Springwatch webcams on the red button is definitely the best breakfast TV option by far…

Watching a live view of a nature reserve at daybreak with no commentary or music is almost as relaxing as sitting in a hide yourself with a pair of binoculars and, to be perfectly honest, allows you to do it without all of that tricky early-morning driving, sandwich-making, or preparing a thermos flask full of something hot, and it has the added benefit that you can fit it around the irritating practice of having to get ready for work or whatever it is that you do with your day.

Instead, as the normal morning routine unfolds, TV camera images showing the gentle antics of a few birds in the wetlands, and the lapping of the water, as the soft breeze wafts through the reeds is quite possibly the most serene and relaxing start to the day that our telly has to offer, at least for a few short weeks, and becomes something that ought to be cherished, even if, on occasions, it draws us in so much that the "normal routine" I mentioned can be thrown completely off-kilter. 

In our less than multi-channelled part of the world, for most of the year, there are really only two morning TV news options, and we pretty much gave up on the BBC option a long time ago, preferring silence to their inane prattle, although, much against my better judgement, I have recently been drawn in to the top of the hour headlines and the morning newspaper review just so that I know what's going on in the mad world I seem to be having to inhabit.

Regular readers will know that I have little time for "the other side" in general, and their recent revamp with the "much loved" big signing (who I personally have always found utterly loathsome and self-obsessed as a TV personality) has not persuaded me otherwise, and so, on most mornings, the TV stays firmly switched to the "off" position.

But for three weeks in the year, the "red button" offers another option, and an escape from the hustle and bustle, bad news, pointless vox-pops, and "celebrity chat" that is the normal offerings of breakfast TV, and it comes as a huge relief.

Personally I'd prefer it if they could give me that option all year, but I know that's not going to happen.

Anyway, if you are up at that time of day and have nothing else to do, give it a whirl. I really don't think that you'll regret it.

FOUR CORNERS

Sometimes in life, you back yourself into a corner (or two), and sometimes life will back you into a corner which may, or may not, be a good thing, depending upon how the cards choose to fall, and, (perhaps a little), upon how you play them. If, for example, it’s a creative corner, this can sometimes be a good thing, but if it’s a corner where you feel that same creative spark might get you into trouble or embarrass you, then, on occasions, those corners can turn into sharp, unexpected hairpins and you find yourself swerving out of control and barely hanging on for grim death. After all, shutting off an avenue of opportunity every once in a while, and putting your head down, isn’t necessarily the worst thing if it can prevent further pain somewhere down the line.

All this preamble is a roundabout way of saying that I’ve found myself in four such corners lately, and some of them have been the former and some the latter, and what the outcome will be is still vague enough to set my insecurity impulse racing and drag me back under that rock where I know I’ll feel safe.

The tax form, after all, ought to have been a breeze, especially as I’d remembered (apparently wrongly) that most of it had been filled in already months ago. Upon opening it up, however, it turned out that I was indeed utterly wrong about that and pages and pages of unmarked print lay in front of me asking questions about my mother’s finances that I could not possibly answer, leading to more endless rounds of telephone calls, and, sadly, more broken nights as the 4.00am panic attacks kicked off again.

Then I made what might turn out to be an online mistake, (although I hope it won’t), which, if it all unfolds as reasonably and unobtrusively as I hope, will probably not be the worst thing, unless, of course, it is indeed the worst thing, in which case it might turn out to be a bigger mistake than I feared it would after I dithered around before taking a reckless “what the heck…” approach.

After all, I reasoned, sometimes a little knowledge is better than just having those eternal unanswered questions to deal with, even if they can sometimes cause other questions to reveal themselves.

In the meanwhile I was  tracked down in an arena where I usually let my creativity run free and immediately found myself shutting down because of the potential embarrassment of being witnessed in circumstances where I’m bound to have to explain myself. The freedom that a certain amount of anonymity gives can be immediately crushed when you may have to look someone in the eye and have them dissect you, I find.

Meanwhile, a social opportunity presented itself and, despite the usual qualms, that particular corner turned out to be okay, and so it turns out that certain corners are perfectly fine to be in, and might actually have doorways in them, and most of my fears are of my own making, and my planned four paragraphs about four corners have already stretched to seven and proves that any kind of planning is probably unwise, and that opening yourself up to the big wide world can be just as stifling as shutting yourself in.

TOO DAMNED...

I’m just too damned tired and too damned miserable to do any blogging at the moment, for so many reasons, not least of which is the fact that the software I try to write this stuff on would rather go for a long walk around the park rather than allow me to type a few words.

Perhaps it’s met me…?

Anyway, it looks as if I went to sleep in an ordinary world, and woke up in an asylum...

What the hell just happened here...? What the hell did we just do…?

I mean, if this is the world that you all want, then I’m done with the whole lot of you and I’m getting the hell away from here. I mean, I’ve often doubted that we have all that much in common, especially when I try to engage with the more simple things, but with this…?

This time you’ve gone too far…!

The simple things I can live with, like when a telephone service pushes concert tickets, and sports events and takeaway pizza to persuade me to join them.

“Hmm…” I think, “I suspect that I'm not your target market...”

This picture was sent to me.
Funny, though...

But when a nation that I’ve always believed to be inherently sensible, fair and reasonable does something like it did last week, I begin to wonder about every one of you.

Prince Charles might have said a few things that a lot of us were thinking about the leader of another country, but perhaps he ought to have been looking closer to home. It’s easy to see the parallels with what happened in the 1930s here. You persuade the young and the jobless that the problems of your nation are somebody else’s fault, you point out to them who you decide the problem is, the particular groups that you’ve taken a dislike to, light the blue touch paper and retire.

The next stage is that, with an army of terrifyingly disaffected thugs behind you, you terrify the rest of the population enough that they’ll do nothing to interfere, and in that way the extremists win and the whole of civilisation goes to hell in a hand cart.

It can’t happen here…?

You bet it can…!

Meanwhile, I’m asked (by my Beloved and just in conversation...) “What would you have as your online dating profile?” and I jokily reply “I’d go Byronesque… Sad, mad, and tedious to know...” and whilst I don’t really mean it at the time, I see what happens a day later and decide that’s probably what the rest of you would believe about me anyway in your brave new world, when you’re rounding up the dissenters and naysayers and deciding that we’re far too much trouble and need to be silenced.

You want simple solutions, you want the problems to go away, but you don’t want to look at the world the way it is and deal with it sensibly, rationally and fairly.

No, you want to make it worse for everyone by believing that it will be better for you, but without putting any effort in to make it work…

Ah... what's the point...?

You’re not listening any more, you just want to believe that everything in the garden’s rosy as we stand here o the brink of madness.

So, instead of me just jabbering on about things nobody cares about, into an idiotic world that no longer seems qualified to listen to reason, here’s a picture I took last week in the days before the world went mad…

See you on the other side...

WAITING IN

Saturday was mostly spent waiting in for a couple of books that I'd ordered to finally turn up, after a week featuring a mammoth amount of irritation from dealing with the online retailer who sold them to me, who appear to have decided to alter their delivery system, one which has worked reasonably adequately for several years, presumably just because my circumstances would make the new set-up far more inconvenient.

Mostly, I'm objecting that they seem to have made getting the stuff I ordered to me my problem rather than theirs, however, that rant is already written and parked, because it's far too dull to share with you here... which, I'll have to admit, given most of my other content, would have to be going some.

The problem with waiting in is that it gets in the way of getting anything else done. You can barely dare to get out of earshot from any of your doors just in case that soft tapping occurs when you've sneaked upstairs for a moment, and return downstairs to find the latest "we tried to deliver your parcel" card sitting smugly on the doormat.

So, having spent a long time on the phone midweek, I finally got them to agree to try again on Saturday and the courier without a depot to otherwise collect from were supposed to make another run at getting my order to me sometime between 7.00am and 9.00pm, which rather put the kibosh on me doing anything else for the duration.

Sadly, I did have to pop out to take my beloved to the railway station at about 9.30am because she had an appointment arranged long before this latest opportunity, but, rather than accompanying her, maybe having a cup of coffee or a mooch around the shops, instead I was committed to being at home at the convenience of this courier service.

Rather more pleasingly, at least, the email telling me that my order was "out for delivery" didn't arrive until after I got back, so there was still a chance that my order would appear and I remained in limbo until either the books arrived, or I received the third "we were unable to deliver" message.

Anyway, I remained glued to the sofa, tapping away at my keyboard and watching some DVDs for several hours simply because I could not dare to move, just in case the mystery man turned up to make the delivery.

Eventually, of course, he did turn up, but not at the door I'd prefer him to, and much of the anxiety faded away and I could get on with my day, noticing that the packaging seems to only allow for three goes, and wondering what would have happened if I'd been too far away to hear his feeble knock...

To be honest, I'm seriously having to reconsider this whole online shopping option given that the goods no longer seem able to be sent to me in such a manner that I can actually easily receive them. At least with the Royal Mail I had a chance to use the "Option B" and go to the relatively local Post Office when they didn't find me at home, whereas this method seems to assume that I can totally rearrange my life to fit around their needs, or that I'm prepared to just let them cancel the order after they are "unable to deliver" after a week of waiting and several alleged attempts to deliver.

Things used to be so simple... but the company involved really don't seem to care about that.

INSIDE THE BOX

SHEFFIELD

I went to Sheffield for the weekend once, when I was about fourteen or fifteen and, to be perfectly honest with you, I’ve never been back and I’ve never wanted to. I’d like to say that this is not Sheffield’s fault, but, for once, I’d have to admit that it possibly is.

Although it probably isn’t and has more than a little to do with my own neuroses rather than anything else, but we’ll come to that.

The point is... NEVER. Been. Back.

You see, when I was a youngling, one of the labels that you could level at me was that I was a Methodist, and one of the things that Methodists did with their offspring in those days was to send them away twice a year on weekends of activity and fun courtesy of the MAYC which was not a misspelling of Mayo, but was an actually thing which involved an Association of Youth Clubs of the Methodist persuasion.

Once a year this would be in London and involve sleeping bags, church halls on the Isle of Dogs, picnics at Alexandra Palace, concerts in the Albert Hall, and a march through the streets, past Whitehall (my first “Maggie… Maggie… Maggie… Out! Out! Out! Occurred on one of these, three days after her election in 1979), and on to a rally in Trafalgar Square.

The other weekend each year would be allocated to “A.N. Other” British city which led to such exciting weekends as “Tyne Time”, “Lincoln Imp-act” and the “Mancunian Way” as well as the “Sheffield Shuffle” which explains why I was there that day.

Whilst I’m sure that I had a lovely time, nowadays the only thing that I can recollect about that weekend was the window being shot out of the coach that I was travelling on and, given that it is the only time so far that anyone has actually taken a shot at me, I have tended to take it personally, even though I hope that it wasn’t personal, and Sheffield has been forever branded, in my mind at least, as a “war zone” and a place to be avoided at all costs.

Was I traumatised by these events? I don’t think so, really, but I have stayed away from the place ever since. After all, it might have only happened once, but of all the places in the world that I’ve been, it happened there, and, given that I’ve only been there the once, in my mind that means a full one-hundred percent of my visits to Sheffield involved me being shot at.

I’m sure that it’s a lovely place, if you like that sort of thing, but it’s never going to be high on my personal list of places to go.

After all, I only really know it for three things; The Shopping Centre, Sheffield Steel, and the World Snooker Championships.

And let’s be honest, there are other shopping centres to go to, most of my personal steel requirements can be acquired pre-rendered from elsewhere, and I can watch the snooker perfectly happily on my television without having to spend any time in a room full of other people (which is a scary enough thought as it is) worrying about whether I’m going to start coughing or worse at a crucial moment.

So, I’m sorry, Sheffield, but you’re not the place for me, and I can’t really see anything bringing us together any time soon. You have nothing that I can think of that you can tempt me with and, whilst I’m sure that you have your fans, and a fair few people with fond memories of you, I don’t think that I’m ever going to be one of them, and I think we just need to accept the fact and move on with our lives, dodging the endless stream of whizzing bullets as we go.

Just wait until I tell you what I think of Portland, Oregon…

FIRST, FIND YOUR IDIOT

I'm often being informed that lots of the things that lie scattered about my little house are "worth" quite a lot. Various old magazines with pictures of particular movie or television stars on the cover will go for quite a few more quid than marked as the cover price apparently, if you know where to look and can be bothered to go looking for the keenest sort of buyer.

However, when you look into it, most of the contents of the various stacks of old magazines the are lying about the place and threatening to engulf me if they should ever collapse are already for sale on certain e-selling sites and often either fail to sell at all, or disappear at a price that is usually just a few pence.

Bloody so-called "Collector's Editions…" or "Exclusive Covers…" or things printed with several covers to tempt the gullible.

Occasionally one lucky seller will find that there is a bidding war for that old edition of something that they just happened to hang on to, but it does rather depend upon two keen and eager buyers happening to come across your offer to sell at precisely the same moment.

In other words, first, find your idiot… then hope that you'll find another idiot at about the same time.

After all, if someone is stupid or desperate enough to want that old Radio Times with "Harry Potter" on the cover that they'll pay three figures for it, who am I to stop them…? It can be quite easy for the unscrupulous dealer to manipulate the obsessions of others so that they are persuaded that some old pieces of tat are actually worth a week's salary to them.

Of course, in the real world, most things are only really "worth" what someone is prepared to pay for them…

You can walk around your house looking at stuff and thinking "Well, I paid XX for that so it must be worth at least YY" or you might be lucky enough to notice that somebody once paid hundreds for something that you also happen to have a copy of, but that doesn't mean that anyone's going to give you a similar price for one, and it might still end up going for seven pence on eBay, only to be sold on by your far more savvy purchaser for those mythical hundreds once they've got their grubby little mitts upon it…

Let the seller beware...

I may well have spent twenty quid or more on that shiny new book when I first bought it, but other copies still turn up in the remainder outlets for less than a quarter of that, or even in the charity shop for a couple of quid if only I'd been more patient, or selling on Amazon for £0.01 (plus postage) if I really want to feel fed up about it.

There, unfortunately, is the reality of it...

Once upon a time, I think that I genuinely believed that I might be creating an archive, or maybe I might need reference material for some topics I was becoming a minor league "expert" in and might be able to give talks about, if I was ever so inclined.

However, these days I'm very aware that it's far more likely that it will all end up just being thrown into a skip once I've carked it.

Still, it's much the same with anything. Houses, cars, jewellery, fine art. Things that are "precious" to you are only so much landfill to almost everyone else… unless they think that they can sniff out a bargain…

Because that's the other side of the coin, isn't it. You're out to get as much as you can for your tat, whereas everyone else is looking to get it as cheaply as they can and maybe make a tidy profit.

There's also the tiny problem that any collector has. How do you get rid of a collection what you've built up without grieving for its loss…?

There are now hundreds of editions of "Empire" Magazine stacked up in my house that I can't see anyone ever wanting, but if I sold them en masse they'd probably struggle to make me a tenner, but individual copies with certain actors on the cover might be able to be sold at many times that on their own to a "Star Trek" or "James Bond" fan, if you know where to look for one...

SECURITY PROTECTED

Spotting this one flummoxed me a tad when I spotted it on my jar of coffee after I'd got it home from Morrison's last weekend.

We'd really just wanted one of those "refill packs" that we normally get to top up the jar that we already had, but they didn't have any of those on sale, and so I had to bite the bullet and invest in a brand spanking new "top of the range", more than six quid a pop jar instead, not realising that I was moving into the realms of fancy goods and luxury items of the type that are coveted enough to have become eminently "nickable…"

After all, I'm used to things like electrical goods, CDs, and bottles of spirits having security tags on them, but jars of coffee…?

It must be a sign of the times we live in, I suppose… and they'll no doubt be tagging the beef and the premium range sausages next, as well as the tomatoes, just to appear to not be being vegetablist.

Meanwhile, I'm fairly sure that all you "real" coffee drinkers will be hugely disappointed in my desire to buy the instant variety, of course, but then I've got to the point where the "proper" stuff is far too strong and does horrible things to my metabolism if I down too much of it.

And then there are the headaches, of course, and I really ought not to undo the "good" that the blood pressure medications are supposed to be doing to me.

Still, I do still appreciate a half decent cup or twelve of joe each day, and, as the latest advice revealed only recently claimed, coffee might be good for you in the battle against diabetes, despite having been declared bad for you in so many other ways.

These guys know nothing…

As apparently do I, when it comes to the small matter of "proper" coffee…

I'm sure that many of you real coffeenistas would find that the brown fluids that I choose to guzzle down like there's no tomorrow would quite happily park themselves under the general heading of the "barely bloody drinkable…"

Not that I can argue with that…

Nevertheless, the various coffee-making devices that we have accumulated about the place over the years all seem to have become far too much of a faff when it comes to both brewing up and cleaning them out afterwards, so they sit about the house gathering dust and a film of grease which only serves to make them even more of a bothersome exercise to start wrangling them… unless, of course, it's a "special occasion" and, well, to be perfectly honest with you, I don't have too many of those nowadays.

Anyway, here we find ourselves, harking back to those Georgian times when the Coffee Houses were the place to go to take a cup of this exotic and luxury item, and where the great and the good of the business community would gather and eventually come up with ideas like the formation of the London Stock Exchange which is just the sort of brilliant idea that led to people not being able to afford to buy the coffee in the first place, and which means that it now needs to be "Security Protected…"

Funny olde worlde, innit…?

THE DOOR

Sometimes, I’ve been known to get more than a little bit obsessive.

“Only sometimes…?” I hear you holler in a most unbelieving manner.

Well, HAHAHA to you and your immaculate perception…

Anyway, it’s rather undeniable that ’tis unfortunately so very true.

Like when I spotted an amazing looking wooden door when I was driving home the other day and I decided that I simply had to immortalize it, despite not really being in a good position to do so.

In the middle of the rush hour, I pulled over into what looked like a lay-by and began fiddling with my teffalone with a view to taking a suitable snapshot to record this doorway for posterity.

Sadly, I failed to notice two things: The first was that the blazing sunshine as coming from directly behind the building into which the door was supplying access and the second was that the lay-by I’d pulled into was actually an exit road for a small industrial estate.

I’d hardly pulled the phone out of my pocket, waited for it to boot up, and fiddled about trying to select the camera option, when I realised that cameras – especially ones built into teffalones - are far less sensitive to the subtleties of light than the average human eyeball is, and that the best I was going to get from my hastily pointed pictures was a murky blur.

As I did my best to get something out of my hasty act of parking up, it became apparent that a large silver car was waiting for me to get out of their way as they tried to leave whichever business they’d been visiting and that I was basically making a right old idiot of myself. So I hastily pointed the camera-phone out of the window, clicked it a couple of times, and pulled back into the queue of traffic as best I could.

A couple of hundred yards farther up the road I pulled over once again at the next available safe spot to examine the spoils, only to find that I did indeed have a couple of murky rectangles for my trouble and, giving up on that particular attempt, I waited for several minutes for the unforgiving traffic to allow me to join it again feeling rather disappointed.

At home, trying out the new photo-editing software on my Kindle, I couldn’t get much out of those pictures, although one filter did give me a kind of painterly effect of which I was rather pleased, even if it failed to show the intriguing peeling and flaking paint patterns which had first caught my eye.

Overnight, as I lay awake, amongst other matters, I found myself fretting over this failure, and determined to give myself another shot at taking a half decent shot before someone decided that painting their door was long overdue and the opportunity to photograph it faded forever.

Have I mentioned that I have been known to get slightly obsessive?

The following morning, I pulled up on my way to work, a couple of hundred yards away from that doorway, and had another go, and this time the light was far less unforgiving and I only had to step back into the road one single pace in order to frame a half decent shot and, luckily, I’m not quite so obsessive that I’m not prepared to look whether anything’s coming before I do something like that, and I was able to get a couple of shots off before any buses, vans or wagons came hurtling along to squish me flat.

Looking at those pictures now, of course, I can scarcely believe that they were worth all of that fuss and bother but, well, I suppose that I’ve recorded them now and, at least, I can relax about it until I start obsessing about the next pointless thing.

ENERGY AND LETHARGY

So much to do, so little time…

And yet…

Somehow another weekend slides by with little in the way of achievement, as the heat of summer descended, but failed to draw me outside all that much in order to enjoy its charms, which, later on, will no doubt feel like a bit of a waste.

Later on, the neighbours whom I briefly saw outside, chatting away in that way that can prove so irritating when you’re trying to enjoy some peace and solitude, seemed amazed that I would admit to having been decorating on what they referred to as “the hottest day of the year” but then I’ve never really been much of a one for either idle chit-chat, or barbeques.

In the aftermath of completing the sale, there was paperwork to be done but, alas, it still remains to be done. Until the final figures are in, there’s still little reason to be troubling myself with the tax forms, I fear, although selling a tiny little one-bedroomed retirement apartment is never going to give you enough to retire on, when everything is settled there may be enough left to pay for a holiday or two, which might be nice.

Meanwhile, the bathroom needed to make another geologically paced leap towards completion, and so wallpaper found itself being attached to walls with accompanying swearing, whilst paint got applied to woodwork at the other end of the room. As this dried and set, the garden got a less than swift strim over, before the painting got its second coat, and some of the overgrown paving got deprived of its weeds and moss.

Finally, Saturday concluded with a crisp Pinot Grigio and a brief sit outside in the gathering gloom where the needs of a much-neglected garden were considered. Two soggy summers and another distracted by various hospital dashes had allowed it to mature into a more natural state than planned, and the bindweed is now the predominant plant being displayed, although it will probably never be impressive enough to please any judges at Chelsea…

Sunday came to with a frenzy of activity where yesterday’s wallpapering got painted over before we made an ill-advised early morning dash to the supermarket which proved to be heaving with customers anticipating an afternoon around their barbeques whilst our planned indulgence of maple and pecan lattices was not to be as the bakery did not appear to have any.

This proved a high point, as then the lethargy hit me and I tried to stay away on the garden bench for long enough to get into my latest book, but failed and instead retired to bed to doze the afternoon away without actually managing to do any sleeping.

This seems to be my lot in life at present; Constant sleepiness, tiredness, fatigue, post-traumatic stress, or whatever else you want to term it, but little in the way of sleep and, as another lazy Sunday came to its inevitable end, I found myself facing Monday morning after having had another broken  night which ended with me getting up at 4.30am having already been awake for hours.

So much time, so little actually done.

TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN

To all intents and purposes, apart from filling out the forms for the tax man, waiting for their response, worrying about any other claims which still might turn up against us, and waiting for the leftover pennies to transfer from one account to another, the sale of mum’s former home is more or less complete, and another giant step has been made in dealing with her Estate.

I made my last ever visit to the flat on Monday evening and read the meters and walked around trying to drink it all in so that I might remember the place, but there’s something vaguely depressing about an empty home, and somehow a set of bare rooms seem to draw attention to their overall bleakness and shabbiness, and every little mark or blemish seems to scream out to remind you that they are there, and that you’ve been damned lucky to persuade someone that a few little rooms were actually “worth” anything at all.

As I locked the door for the last time, knowing that I was unlikely ever to return to that place, part of me was overwhelmed with sadness, whilst another was just hollering at me to “take the money and run, you lucky, lucky people…”

That last few days was filled with almost unbearable tension as days slipped by with tales of missing documents, non-appearances of deposits, and flights from Australia, and right up until the email arrived telling me that exchanges had occurred and completion would be the following day, I still didn’t really believe that it was actually going to happen, and fully expected to find myself back at square one before the week was out.

However, the last day of ownership of mum’s flat started with a round of phone calls, which meant a confusing call to the electricity company – who still seem ill-equipped to deal with bereavement – which left me wondering if they believed that I was moving from my mother’s home to the place I’ve lived in for nearly two decades.

Then the water company seemed perplexed by the fact that my meter readings didn’t tally with the electronic ones they’d taken in January, despite the fact that nobody had let them in and the meter seemed outrageously analogue.

The insurance company were far more pragmatic, but told me that the cover would stop “immediately” as I made that call, which seemed worth the risk, given that the place was essentially empty, and the clock was ticking.

Finally, there was an exchange of emails asking if it was okay to cancel the Direct Debit for the management fees, before the scariness and wondrousness of Online Banking meant that I could stop those with the click of an icon.

Later on, I rang the Estate Agents, just to confirm their Friday closing times so that I could drop off the last set of keys. They told me that the first sale in the chain had already completed, and indulged a bit of chunnering about my solicitor not ringing them the previous day, so I promised to pass on any email notifications as and when I got them.

An almost unbearably tense morning followed until the email finally popped in confirming that my mother’s home no longer belonged to me, and I made a brief courtesy call to the Estate Agents just as the new owner arrived to pick up his keys, so, as the old “News of the World” might have put it “I made my excuses and left” – or at least terminated the call.

There was a brief flurry of emails between my solicitor and myself as a mildly depressing afternoon drifted by, some of which involved a “vital document” which had been mislaid, which is the kind of thing that happens when you write important information that your legal adviser needs on a “Post-It” note because you can’t find anything else to write it on as you’re dashing about.

Other self-adhesive note-taking formats are, of course, available.

Finally, on my way home from work, I swung by to drop off that last set of keys and, without any great deal of ceremony, or any real acknowledgement of the seismic shift that they represented in my mind, they were accepted from me and the whole process was officially over, and I headed home through truly spectacularly awful Friday evening traffic in a slightly melancholy mood, reflecting upon so many things that it took half a bottle of very strong wine to help pass the evening.

I still don’t really know how I feel about this change in my life. I suspect that it’s going to take quite some time for me to adjust to this alteration in my circumstances, and I will have to remind myself time and again that the place no longer belongs to us, that I no longer have to worry about it, or just “drop by” and that the world has moved on in an infinitismally small and yet astonishingly huge way.