TWO ROOMS (TWO)

…and so we emerge, blinking like troglodytes, into the sunlight, with the vast bulk of the manual labour now done, and with merely the odd disappointment, and the loss of a couple of mugs, a butter knife, a dish drainer, and a cereal bowl to worry about, along with the mysteriously broken seal on my "new" jar of coffee, and the prospect of a little retouching, filling, and shelf construction to gnaw away at my weekends for the foreseeable future.

I'm also poorer to the tune of most - if not all - of my inheritance from my mother's estate, but feel sure that she would have felt pleased that we did something "vaguely worthwhile" with it.

There remains, of course, much to do, not least the return of all the stuff to it's new rightful places, and the lugging of what feels in my mind to be several thousand boxes from the storage unit, and the general sorting out of the clutter which still infests much of our tiny little abode.

I conservatively estimate that, with the wind in the right direction, good luck, and enough weekends being free from commitment, we might be done with it all by October.

This may persist in keeping me away from the keyboard for a while yet, but, well, you never know, I may just find the desire to "tappity-tap" out a few words from time-to-time as this year evaporates, so, as ever, "stay tuned"…!

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.

SO… HOW WAS YOUR STORM…? (PART TWO)

Because you knew that I spoke too soon.

I thought that we'd got off far too lightly, and that I was tempting fate by saying so, but the second phase of the big storm did inflict some damage upon us after all.

A tiny, almost insignificant amount in the great scheme of things. A barely perceptible blip in the not-so-great ongoing and unfolding tale that is my life. Something barely worth mentioning, really, but, because these pages have a nasty habit of confessing all, and mentioning absolutely everything, I'm still going to mention them anyway, despite the fact that bringing up something so trivial when other people are suffering such hardship and loss smacks of the tactless and thoughtless at the very least, and swings precariously towards the utterly crass...

Inevitably we have still been very lucky, not least because, when the storm came back for another go, two days after that first devastating visitation, I had the option to choose not to actually venture outside to go to work during the second phase, but instead set up at home and do whatever my thing is from there whilst listening to the raging, howling wilds, and the harsh blattering of the raindrops and the hailstones as they beat down onto the slates on my roof.

So that damage...

It really was not a massive amount at all, but was more of an irritation and a bit of a worry, if the truth were being told. It was certainly nothing devastating enough to make the six o'clock news or anything like that, but there are consequences and, unfortunately, they are consequences which will have to be dealt with.

When I got up on Saturday morning, with the rain still blatting down, I thought that I heard an ominous dripping sound coming from beyond the drawn curtains. Now, normally, this would not bother me. Quite regularly we hear the dripping noises as remnants of rainstorms hang on to the stones and the pipes and the PVC until they find the gravity of their situation impossible to resist and they freefall down towards a splashy oblivion, and usually, despite the volume of the sound they make during their death throes, they are actually outside and doing us little harm.

However, when I opened up the living room curtains, this time it was different, because there it was; That telltale puddle of water on the window sill letting me know that the rain was actually getting in.

This, of course, meant an immediate panic followed by a rapid rush around the house looking for the old towels I used when the washing machine leaked last year to mop up this growing pool, before digging out a couple of buckets and other receptacles to catch the bigger drips which were now squeezing their way through the masonry with alarming regularity and which did seem to get more persistent as the morning progressed.

Of course, thinking about it rationally later, I did come to believe that it was just that the stone lintel above the window was so saturated with water that it had nowhere else to go.

Happily, later on in the day, as I was putting out the bins, I ran into our local builder and asked him to take a quick look, and he pointed out those barely noticeable cracks in the mortar between the stones which was probably normally allowing the slowest of seepage, but the effects of which had been exaggerated by the unprecedented scale of the recent torrents.

Anyway, after a bit of negotiation and discussion, and if all goes according to plan, he thought that a little bit of pointing should probably solve the problem and so, if he remembers, that might actually get done if he gets a free moment and the weather clears for long enough.

Throughout the weekend, further rainstorms, ones which were mostly pointing in other directions, came and went, and, luckily for us, the dripping didn't persist, despite me having gone out and bought one of those large "under bed" storage boxes to catch the drips because it fitted more snugly onto the window sill than all those buckets did, and covered more of the problem area...

So there you are... Another non-tale of woe. Please feel free to roll your eyes in disbelief and share your tales of true hardship with me any time you like.

After all, that, in its small and slightly inconvenient way was my storm, but I was really asking how yours went...

GRANDAD'S GRAND DESIGNS (PHOTOBLOG)

In the 1950s, my grandfather had the first of the two houses which he had built in his lifetime constructed at Green Lane in Hyde, Cheshire. This house was called "The Hawthorns" and they lived there until it was sold in 1974 when I was about ten years old.

My grandparents then moved into a flat in John Grundy House for nearly two years whilst the second house he built, a split-level retirement bungalow, was being built elsewhere in Hyde, but sadly, so far at least, I've not yet found any of the pictures he may have taken during that build, which he completed in 1976, and where he lived with my grandmother until his death in 1980.

My grandmother remained in that house until she sold it and moved into a retirement apartment in Stockport in 1989.

These pictures, taken as that original build of "The Hawthorns" progressed, resurfaced recently as we were going through mum's possessions after she died, and I hope you find them as fascinating as I do.

GRAND OBSESSION

Since we had some work done on the house, our latest obsession has become the nightly repeats from twelve or more years of the TV series "Grand Designs" where the sort of scary and obviously overpaid people (Most of whom I just know that I simply wouldn't get along with if ever I met them) build their dream houses whilst usually foolishly maintaining that they can keep it all within their already massive-seeming budgetary limitations.

We'd stopped this programme watching years ago, to be honest, although I'm not sure why. Perhaps we just lost interest, or moved on to other things and never really had the time, or the "revisits" seemed far too much like repeats for us to waste our time upon them, or maybe it was just that the people involved got far too annoying, but, for whatever reason it was, those daily weeknight repeats have provided us with an awful lot of material that we simply hadn't seen before, although towards the end of last week's run, there were beginning to be the suspicions that we had actually seen one or two of these before, as the episodes started to overlap with our own original viewings.

Perhaps the reason that we've rediscovered this show lately is because we are just feeling a need to empathise in some small way with other people living in far more chaos than ourselves as builders were ripping the guts out of our own little house. Somehow, when you watch people grinding their way through planning applications, and watching as rain pours through another not-yet-watertight house frame as another project looks as if it's about to fail due to an unexpected financial shortfall or bankruptcy, the fact that you have your own little problems of tiptoeing around the chaos at home doesn't seem quite so bad.

And it does always seem to turn out okay in the end, mostly, despite the sense of false jeopardy that the wonderfully dry presenter, Kevin McCloud sometimes tries to forecast just before the ad breaks, and, despite any misgivings that he might have along the way, he always seems to manage to eventually be hugely supportive of the people who embark upon these mad schemes, and the ultimate products of their labours.

In amongst all of the bankers and hippies, two sets of characters tend to crop up in conversation whenever you discuss the programme with anyone else who admits to watching it. One is the young man in the woods who wanted to build himself a structure out of local timber and who seemed to have his entire lifestyle so utterly sorted that he appeared to have such a calm and idyllic life, and such a healthy sense of proportion, that many people seemed to envy it.

The others were the elderly couple who built the rather impressive HufHaus in their back garden using a German team who brought an impressive air of quiet efficiency to a series in which builders can usually come in for quite a lot of stick. That time, Kevin seemed mildly exasperated (and perhaps a little astonished, too) at quite how swimmingly the entire build seemed to progress, because there's very little false jeopardy to play on when it's all going quite so well.

I should have house building in my blood. My grandfather built two houses in his lifetime. There was the grand detached house known as "The Hawthorns" which he built in the 1950s, and the split-level "retirement bungalow" that he built in the 1970s. Neither of these houses remained in the family, unfortunately, and I could never even begin to imagine having enough money in the bank to build such a thing.

Not that I'd want to, of course. The whole process looks like a nightmare to me, and as I rattle onwards towards my fifties, the thought of sacrificing at least two years to that sort of chaos really does not appeal at all.

Maybe it's that familiar lack of aspiration and ambition that stymies me...?

Who knows, but it certainly looks far too much like hard work to me.

Meanwhile, as I've been watching those old episodes, I've started playing a new game. It's called "Grand Designs On A Budget" and it works like this: You take one of the typical phrases that you'll hear in the course of one of the episodes, and you add your own DIY twist. So:

"The minimalism of the bulb hanging from a single socket really sets off the simplicity of the style of the room..." 

"Despite attempting to combine the mad juxtaposition of colours in all those matchpots they might just pull this off"
 

"Deciding to add the personally hand-painted second coat of emulsion has already doubled the expected cost..." 

"This white bathroom suite has been personally hand-picked by them from the budget range at B&Q..."
 

"This radiator brush alone cost an astonishing FIVE pounds..."

Well, it's keeping me relatively sane, anyway, as I contemplate the list of jobs that are still needing to be done chez nous...

BUILDERS (2)

I'm sorry if I keep on returning to this notion, but I regularly start to convince myself that this particular blog is doomed. Never more so than in recent times when it's just become increasingly difficult to get much in the way of "keyboard time" as the chaos of everyday life swirled around me.

Some days I just wonder whether I'm going to get any chance at all to it myself down and do anything more than splurge out a few thoughtless words, and on some mornings I wonder whether I'll even manage to to that.

Then there's the tricky little matter of having so much thinking going on inside my head that, perhaps with an irony that has yet to hit me, I can't think of anything to actually write about.

At least, nothing that I would imagine would have been of any actual interest to anybody else...

Take, for example, the other day.

I idly decided that, given the amount of "add-ons" that had accumulated with the building work that was being done on the rickety hovel that we refer to as "Blogfordshire Towers" it might be worth just asking what the current running total might actually be, before I committed us to yet another additional bit of work that had revealed itself to be, if not exactly imminently necessary, then certainly on the agenda.

The answer kind of floored me, and, having texted the beloved with the dreadful news, ranted to various people about it and (because this is the nature of modern life) Tweeted about it afterwards:

Today it turns out that I forgot the "Grand Designs" first rule of building budgeting: Assume everything will double, and then add the VAT.

I then found out that there had been some kind of misunderstanding which meant that the eight or nine hours of bowel-cramping anxiety and running around wondering what we were going to do without any savings left, and where the hell I was going to find the extra cash to pay for the work that was still in progress, that I had put myself through had all been pointless and that things were still pretty much in the ball-park of our initial expectations.

Which only goes to show that, when someone uses a phrase like "about twelve" it's probably wise to make sure that you're both talking about the same thing, and to know which units they are working in.

WATER BORED (2)

Day three of the strange excavations of the water board I believed would bring nothing new. After all, so far they'd discovered no undiscovered remains of lost kings, no Roman silver coins and, mercifully, no corpses left by any former occupants of Blogfordshire Towers.

Instead I imagined that things would remain much the same as they had done the day before, except that I had taken a moment and moved my bucket ("Oo-er, missus!") when I spotted a dog happily drinking the ghastly contents of it.

But then, at half past ten, I heard mutterings outside and bounded downstairs to see fluorescent jackets through the frosted glass of the back door. After dithering, I summoned up what little courage I had and engaged with them, asking what had become of the broken pieces of paving stone that their colleagues had carted away, and whether they were likely to be able to put in a decently matching replacement...?

"It'll stick out like a sore thumb!" came the gleeful reply. You could tell that this gentlemen was enjoying putting one over on the obvious tosser who had buttonholed him. He already knew that there would be sore thumbery as they were going to use a standard concrete slab, but had been hoping, I imagine, to scurry away from what they thought to be an empty house before anyone could comment, and, because I obviously registered some displeasure, he promised to "Get on to t'gaffer" and ask whether they'd be able to source a more suitable replacement because, he claimed, they do actually do that kind of thing.

I did point out that, given that the entire row had identical stone flags, someone was likely to mention it being so very different, and he nodded in what I mistook for a vaguely sympathetic manner.

In the meantime though, he explained, because of penalty clauses with "t'council" and so forth, they told me they would have to patch it with what they had, which they then did before going away, with me suspecting that this would be the very last we ever see of the Utilities crowd, at least with regard to this particular project...

And what a lovely job United Utilities have made of blending in when replacing the old stone flag that they broke...

The weekend followed and, naturally (for we are talking "working days" here) team number four did not appear with an old stone flag, as I suspect they never will. I did, however, come up with a new game to play. As I walk around town, every time I spot a flagstone that doesn't match all the ones surrounding it, especially if there's been an architectural choice to make the area more pleasing, or if I see a kerbstone that doesn't match the rest, or a patch of road surface which looks slightly different to all of the surrounding area, I will stop and point and say "Look! Another United Utilities like-for-like repair!"

This might keep me amused for months...

WATER BORED (1)

So there we were, having the bathroom converted, when a van rolls up unannounced from the utilities company and starts digging a ruddy great hole outside the kitchen window...

The stop tap outside which services the entire row of houses needs replacing, it seems. It's a scheduled job, they say, and I ought to have known that they were coming because of the blue "X" which has been painted upon the metal access cover by a person or persons unknown at some point during the last whenever.

There's a secret code, it would appear... A blue cross means that someone will be turning up without warning and digging a hole fairly soon, it seems.

I was more than a little miffed, to be honest, not least because they shattered the paving stone, went away leaving a ruddy great hole and a load of debris, and also left me full of the sort of irritation of knowing that if I had known they were coming, I might never have scheduled my own building work to coincide with such an intrusive, invasive and irritating event.

However, I also immediately started to have one of those terribly British worries - that all of my neighbours would be massively inconvenienced by this and would then put two and two together and make twelve,  assuming, quite erroneously, that this development must have something to do with the various builders and tradesmen who have been traipsing in and out of my own back door this past couple of weeks.

Worse still, I had to go out for part of the evening and had visions of many of them coming home from their various working days and tutting sternly at this unexpected and unexplained excavation, and being put back at the very top of the social pariahs list without having any opportunity to defend myself.

When I did eventually get home myself, I was, at least, able to knock at next door's door and explain that I had no knowledge of what it was all about, using as my excuse to call round, the old ploy of wondering whether they'd had a notification letter which I had somehow failed to receive.

Happily, having just arrived home herself, my neighbour hadn't even noticed the hole as yet, so I was able to demonstrate its awful presence with a less than impressive "voila" in the manner of a less than impressive prestidigitator...

Still, at least I got the chance to explain the situation and weedle out a half-hearted "It's not my fault..." before the debate got really started.

In the morning I overheard one end of  the conversation as she rang the number written upon the big yellow portable fence, and she seemed far less happy with them about it, and being fobbed off with the old "Data Protection Issues" mantra when she tried to find out more.

Our own enquiries gleaned little more. They've replaced a stop tap in the "communal area" at the back of the house because "somebody" had reported a fault. It will, they say, be completed within 5 working days and the area will be made good so they should put everything back as they found it, slab repair included.

Later on that same morning, a second crew arrived to shift the rubble left by the first crew, stack the yellow fence parts, and managed to go away again without a word and leaving a partially filled-in ruddy great hole (with no slab on it) for (presumably) some third crew to come along and fill in.

Weirdly, I think that the rubble they cleared away might have included the original Victorian paving slab pieces which will be a bugger to match and which they might very well have known were there if they'd been part of the original excavation crew, but I suppose that's not for me to say...

BUILDERS (1)

Ah yes...

Having builders in your home...

Such a relaxing situation.

It's not their fault of course, they're just doing a job and, furthermore, they're doing a job that you've requested them to do, so it would be churlish to complain about the fact that they're there, but the upheaval in your life, especially if you're anything like me and have a very rigid view of your life and are very set in your ways, can be quite unsettling.

You can, of course, get used to anything, and it is sometimes good to remind yourself that, no matter how unsettled you might feel in such a situation, many more people in this world are struggling with far worse conditions on a daily basis and, for them, perhaps it's with no end to it in sight.

We have adjusted to sleeping in the tent-like (shudder!) environment of the attic space, and negotiating our way into the bathroom with a lamp during the night, and brushing our teeth using the kitchen sink. We've even adjusted to the slight ripeness of not having a bath, shower or basin to wash in and borrowing the facilities of others whenever we can. We even got quite used to leaving the house and trying to find things to do for the duration of the long working day because it was our "week off" and mooching around with nothing much to do and all day to do it in is kind of what holidays ought to be.

However, here I find myself at the start of week two and reflecting upon week one as things are about to get really tricky. Because of the break-in at work, I now have to at least attempt to work from home for a while whilst downstairs the crashing and banging of the work continues. Not only that but we're approaching a key phase and the toilet might just disappear for a significant portion of the day, not that I'd've wanted to interrupt the work anyway just so that I could have a pee.

Half a dozen of those and it starts to get embarrassing...

Then there's the knotty little issue of battling my way down to the kitchen and trying to make myself a drink or some lunch, and whether there's a certain amount of etiquette involved in boiling yourself a kettle and whether this magically transforms the builders into "guests" for the duration of the brew up...?

Not only that but my work is rather dependent upon a regular electricity supply, something that I suspect might be subject to occasional interruptions as the electrics are worked upon in the bedroom and the bathroom.

I think that I might just hide myself, Gollum-like, in the attic, with a bucket, a sandwich and a thermos flask, and hope for the best, but it's hardly the most professional of environments for me to trigger my creativity in order to pay for the work that's being done now, is it?

LOCATION, LOCATION

The question is...

Can I still actually type on this thing?

Well, perhaps it's not so much the question, but it certainly is a question...

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Perhaps I ought to explain...

I've had to dig out my dodgiest, oldest relic of a computer (It's slow, it's chunky, it's really very clunky...) for the duration. Ah...! "The duration of what?" I hear you ask.

Well, it's like this. The builders are coming! The builders are coming! (Don't worry, they're here!) and, because two of our five rooms are going to be unavailable for a while as they get the much overdue TLC they have so desperately needed for a dozen years or more, all of the junk and clobber from those two rooms has had to be redistributed amongst the other three, and we have had to abandon the primary bedchamber and regroup in the auxiliary one, in a not-quite "USS Enterprise" kind of a way.

This means that the bright lights and tappity-tap-tapping of the computer upon which I usually write to you, my dear universe, would not go down too well in the wee small hours when all the sane folk (most especially the beloved) are a-slumbering right next to where I normally do my insane night time keyboarding, and I have had to escape to otherwhere in order to indulge my morning fix of wordsmithery.

Which has meant resurrecting the coal-fired relic upon which I'm now trying to write.

Oh! The poor, much maligned creature! Once upon a time it used to be the fastest processor on the block and its days and evenings were spent helping me to create the wittiest, sharpest dialogue which never got performed.

We were, if not exactly inseparable, well...

Let's just say that we spent a lot of time in each other's company, albeit mostly to little avail.

But then shinier boxes turned up with their snappy, distracting new ways, and this old relic was cast aside and consigned to the darkness with just occasional battery charges whenever I remembered it was there. Sweeping vistas of bloggery were churned out upon other, chunkier keyboards, as this little box of tricks could only watch in neither awe nor wonder and ask itself "But what about the plays...?"

We were happy together, of course, but I'm so easily distracted, and yet, here we are, together again, for old times' sake, sitting together churning out a different (and perhaps slower) kind of nonsense as the plaster dust settles around us upon each and every surface.

I suppose that this is my oblique way of saying that normal service might be a bit hit and miss over the next few days, because it takes my little tiny brain a while to make the astounding leap from device to device, despite the fact that QWERTY is still in the same order and the site software looks much the same.

In many ways I dislike switching computers because I like the familiarity of what I'm used to. I like to feel as if I'm coming home when I switch on and that everything is where I left it, although, given the current state of my little house, perhaps that's not the best of analogies...

STABLE

The situation with my mother is always a matter of dealing with both the unknowable and the great unknown. It remains complicated despite being very simple; At some point she will be required to return home and she will expect that I will be the person who is able to deliver her there. Meanwhile, lengthy lists of things that she thinks ought to be done are being composed in her mind alongside the huge disappointment of the fact that I don't spontaneously think of doing them myself. There's also the tricky little matter of the slight chance that she may have some kind of relapse, or be unable to cope, or have a thousand and one little reasons to contact me at precisely the wrong moment, expect me to drop anything and everything that I am doing, no matter how important that might happen to be, and come running.

This means that I am constantly on alert, constantly on edge, and seldom in a position to completely relax or try to plan to do anything. Sometimes, when things have been calm for a while, we foolishly try and take a moment to think about doing something, anything, that will help us to escape from the rut, but that's usually when, as the saying goes, all hell breaks loose...

Meanwhile, the builder rang...

We had a quote to have some work done way back in the relatively quiet month of March and then, of course, life did indeed let loose hell and here we find ourselves in August with none of it done, and living out of bags because we let the old furniture go in anticipation of this work sometime in April.

Anyway, he had, apparently, been "trying to contact me" and left "loads of messages" and wondered whether we still wanted the job actually done. Now I do work in an area where the internet and telephone connections are basically what can only be described as  "rubbish" but this seemed unlikely.

Anyway, he wondered if he could start the job imminently in the sense of "the day after tomorrow" which, quite naturally meant that we had to face the fact that our little house was suddenly going to be in for some little upheaval, especially as the "one room at a time" option we had hoped for had evolved into "both rooms at once" leaving us nowhere to shift the clutter of the one into the other for the duration...

When the builder came round on the Tuesday evening to make plans, it became abundantly clear that the short notice meant that there was little chance of us being ready for them in time and we were able to get a delay to beyond the weekend before spending the rest of our free time for the foreseeable clearing rooms and churning the junk around and finding that we were forming great big piles of stuff that would not have looked out of place on one of those "Hoarder" programmes which have become so popular lately.

Well, at least it's not just us, then...

So, we are now in a state of chaotic preparation and not exactly looking forward to living in rather bizarre circumstances for the foreseeable future, which is making us generally stroppy and stressful and full of fear and trepidation and wondering if we should just book into a B & B for the duration.

Given my mum's almost uncanny ability to exocet any of my plans whenever I have anything that needs to be done to any particular given schedule, I have taken to trying to get everything done now, which has not really helped with anyone's stress levels recently and probably doesn't help to get anything achieved any faster if I'm being perfectly honest.

All I can see, though, is time being chewed up and the fact that I've got far, far too much that still needs doing and fewer and fewer hours in which to get it all done and that, dear reader, is likely to cause the things that lurk in the dark corners of my mind to get more confident and come out of the shadows all guns blazing, so things around her could get very "interesting" for a while.

What I need, what I really, really need right now is for something to be stable, something to be dependable, something to be reliable. I need something in my life to be a calm void, to be somewhere I can escape to in my mind and get a moment of peace as the hurricane whips all around me...

But, at the moment, I really can't see that happening...

Can you...?

ABSTRACT...?

Now, I don't know about you, but...

The last thing that I'd be looking for when it comes to something like a new roof...

Would be something...

Abstract.

YOU CAN HAVE TOO MANY BOOKS

“The builders are coming! The builders are coming! Don’t panic! Don’t panic!”

Easter Saturday morning was spent shifting the many, many books from off the bookshelves in the bedroom up to a place where they would be out of the way, and, despite everything I’ve ever said about such things, when you’re lugging another pile up the stairs for the thirtieth time, and your knees are really starting to remind you of how old you’re actually getting, it becomes as clear as crystal that yes, indeed, you actually can have too many books…

Of course, having made the decision to make a start on the much needed TLC the inside of our crumbling little pile is desperate need of, and then having actually summoned up the courage to ring the builder and get an estimate for the work required, preferrably to be done a room at a time for both practical and financial reasons, it became increasingly obvious that we would have to churn the clutter around a bit to give them some space to actually do the work in.

So, with a lot of reluctance, not least because of a predilection we have towards doing as little as possible with our weekends because of the hellish nature of the average week, the four-day Easter weekend was assigned towards having a bit of a clearout in the first of the rooms designated for a bit of a spruce up, and, because of the sheer quantity of junk we seem to have accumulated, it became increasingly clear that four days may not have been enough time in which to manage it.

Especially with the “Yes… No… Yes… No…” Yoyo effect being used by the NHS with regards to whether my mother ought to be sent home, or not.

When the entire four-day break is consumed by “It will definitely be tomorrow…” it makes it terribly difficult to actually plan anything…

And then there was the slight issue of when the building work might actually begin. We weren’t expecting anything immediate, you understand, especially not with the recent unexpected wintry weather putting the kibosh on pretty much any work that they may already have been doing, but we did have the sneaking suspicion that if we did nothing at all there was almost bound to be a phone call telling us that they would be arriving tomorrow, even though, in real terms, I know that I’m now going to be looking at an empty room and carefully manoeuvring my way around piles of books for the foreseeable future.

Already I find myself desperate to look up a particular fact in a book that is somewhere behind those piles and I’m veritably twitching at the possibility of “just moving a few of them” in order to see whether I can actually get to the one I want, if it is, of course, actually on the shelf I think it is…

But that way chaos (or at least a book avalanche) lies… So you see, it is with some actual wisdom, gained from genuine real experience, that I am able to state quite categorically that you can, in all honesty, have too many books…

ROOF OFF

There is something decidedly alarming about having the roof taken off your house, even if it is supposed to be for the long term benefit of improving its general condition and making it a better, less moist, place to live. But it’s especially alarming to be having it done during the depths of winter when the frost or the rainstorms or a howling gale could come at any moment.

Rather naturally, because it’s me, the rainstorms, frosts and howling gales waited until exactly the moment when the slates were nicely stacked up in piles at the front of the house, and therefore no longer capable of keeping the raindrops from falling on my head whilst I was still indoors, before arriving en masse, and then refusing to let up ever since.

Hoorah!

This then leads to all sorts of worries and stresses which you never really expected. You find yourself staring at the sky from time to time and wondering quite what the weather’s going to bring, you start to ponder about which of your precious paper based collections and documents are filed away under the most vulnerable parts of the house, and, perhaps most weirdly of all, you find yourself listening out for strange and unusual noises which might imply a leak or a loosening or a thief in the night flitting away with those carefully numbered and catalogued slates which make up the jigsaw puzzle of your home’s weatherproof lid.

Since the thing has been stripped down to whatever those Victorian builders considered to be the basic structure of roofwork, I’ve not actually seen the place in daylight either, so all I can do is arrive home and wave a torch in the general direction of where my roof was in the vague hope that instead of wooden laths or shiny polythene I will merely see the comforting light absorbing matt blackness of a roof restored.

Other things that start the worry wheel spinning in the wee small hours, of which I have seen many during the time the work’s been continuing (I am, after all, a perennial worry-wort…), is the money running out before they get to the stage of actually putting the roof back on.

You know the sort of thing… “I’m sorry, Mr H, but we’ve come across another little problem that you really ought to consider dealing with…”

Keep writing the cheques and, above all, keep on smiling…

However, it’s not only that which is keeping me awake at all hours, but every noise, every scratch, or scrape or (God help us) drip, even if it’s only coming from the tap downstairs in the kitchen, tends to leave you believing that there are massive holes up there where the water’s pouring through and that the whole lot’s going to come in at any moment. Every time it starts to rain and the water drops lash against the windows, or the polythene where the tiles used to be, is another booming reminder of just how vulnerable everything indoors actually could be and that you might be leaping into action to spend half the night rearranging precious valuables and empty buckets and basins just to catch whatever rainwater you can, or mopping furiously and sobbing quietly to yourself after a long session of rediscovering ways of swearing and ranting which you thought you’d long forgotten or perhaps didn’t know that you ever even knew.

The birds don’t help. At least, I think it’s the birds… Scraping and scratching and looking for bugs and grubs and poking their beaks through the plastic before flying off with the spoils to make nests with it.

But then, well, the birds don’t tend to fly at night, do they? So… What the hell was it exactly which was walking across my roof at four-thirty in the morning, scratching their way around and rolling pebbles off the apex and into the gutters…?

I lay awake for hours listening to all sorts of things moving about up there, and the occasional rolling of a pebble, or footstep, or squeaking of a wheelbarrow can turn into all sorts of criminal activity or unfolding disasters in my mind, because I simply do not like feeling so vulnerable, or being dependant upon the whims of others, in order for the cocoon that makes up my little world to feel safe, secure and snug again.

Of course it was probably just the edges of the sheets of polythene flapping about…

That’s what I convinced myself that it was by the arrival of last weekend…

But then the gales came, and the rainstorms, and there were still no slates on my roof and it all started to get just a little bit scary…

By that stage I was barely sleeping at all. Those dripping taps from the kitchen which I’ve consistently failed to address would continue conjure up desperate images of the ceiling pouring in water all over my precious collections of old magazines and I spent each subsequent night hopping in and out of bed like a yoyo whenever I thought I heard anything, or else lying there listening or thinking about every possible “worst case scenario” under the sun.

When I finally gave up and got up to face the pitch darkness of another morning, all bleary-eyed and yawning, my spirits were not high, and it was still raining, and there were still no slates on my roof, and I had to head off to work and spend the entire day wondering about what water-damaged disasters might possibly await me by the time I got home.

And people ask me why I procrastinate about “getting things done…”

IT BEGINS

Well, in a tiny parody of the old “slash and burn” techniques known to humanity since time immemorial, the tree’s now been removed from amongst the roof slates in which it was growing, and our roof has been inspected, and the quotation for the second phase of the tiny but costly project to stop water from seeping into my walls has arrived, and, despite being written in fluent “Rooferspeak” - and therefore mostly a complete mystery to me - we’ve kind of agreed to letting them go ahead and spend our meagre savings upon continuing to have some kind of a roof over our heads.

I had, of course, been rather pleased that the quote had been set at what I thought was a “manageable” level, knowing that the savings that had been squirreled away for the coming of the inevitable day when the “something” which “had to be done about it” would finally come, were at least in place, even though large chunks of them were already spoken for simply because of the arrival of the scaffolding.

“We can just about afford this…” I mused, with a certain amount of relief, “…as long as nothing else goes wrong…”

I had, of course, joked about the essential first rule of the television programme “Grand Designs” is that any budget allocated for any building project will have to be at least doubled before the project is completed, but I don’t think that I really believed it.

I do now…

Because, despite the regular doses of lashing rain, and then the scaffolding standing idle since the rather costly “bit of weeding” was done, the work has begun…

We’d arrived home one evening a couple of days earlier, just as darkness fell, but in time to notice that more ladders were in place on the actual roof. This, we suspected, rather implied that progress was being made and the work we’d agreed to in the “second” estimate, and we went inside rather reassured that the worries of the creeping mould and spreading damp patches would soon, at least, be a thing of the past, or, if not that, at least not getting any worse.

I’d also been quite pleased to finally manage to have a quick word with our neighbour as I had arrived home one other evening. The fact that one of the struts supporting the scaffolding tower had been put over the boundary and into my neighbour’s garden had bothered me since I first noticed it, but, because of busy lives and whatnot, we’d not actually run into each other since in order to have a chat about it.

In the meantime, there had been an “administrative error” where our estimate had been posted through next door’s letter box and had been “opened in error” as our neighbour was already expecting an invoice from the very same building company which we are using to have our work done. Naturally, an apologetic note had been scribbled on the back of the envelope explaining all of this, but I did also want to explain that we hadn’t really been bothered by this slight and inadvertent intrusion into our business dealings.

Happily, because our immediate neighbours rather luckily seem to be thoroughly charming people, there were no problems about any of this and, in fact, I was told that they had already mentioned to the builder that if there were any immediate and accessible problems that could be resolved whilst the scaffolding was in position, they’d be more than happy for those to be dealt with too…

Hmmm…

Then, one afternoon, my telephone rang at work, which always bewilders me, not least because virtually nobody but my boss has that number, but also because the signal coverage in the grey box next to the sewage works is notoriously awful and any conversations seem to immediately resemble an old “Norman Collier” routine.

Basically, it was the builder calling.

They had, it transpired, discovered “problems” and the initial estimate would have to be torn up as they would need to do far more work than was originally imagined when the roof was first inspected because the roof is so old that certain standard things which you might expect to be in place in order to make a roof “sound” and “waterproof”, the two things which are pretty much essential when it comes to roofs, were not actually in place.

Whether they’d rotted away over time or were never the kinds of things put in by builders of cheap Victorian workers’ dwellings is anyone’s guess, but this is precisely the sort of possibility – the fear of what might be uncovered once anyone started probing around - which led to my years of procrastination in the first place.

In the end, of course, there’s not really much choice but to let them go ahead and do it. All I can do is cross my fingers and hope that the budget doesn’t run out when they’re still at a stage which leaves me with no roof up there at all. It is, however, all a bit of a worry, so I’ll no doubt be returning to this topic again over the coming weeks...

It begins…

SUDDENLY SCAFFOLDING

I came home midweek to find that, whilst it wasn’t entirely unexpected that it would eventually be, the front of the house had, very suddenly and without warning, been clad in scaffolding which persuaded me that perhaps some kind of a start had been made on our tiny bit of building work.

I’m not entirely sure, however, because I’ve not actually seen the place in daylight since, so it’s really hard to tell, what with all of the angles and darkness and all, whether the tree that was growing out of the roof is still there, or whether I just have a fancy sculpture standing next to the front of my home that seems designed merely to “bother” the neighbours as they pass along.

It’s a bit odd really. Having given the okay for the work to proceed, we still kind of expected to actually hear something before everything got started so that we might be able to knock on a few doors and what have you in order to let people know what was about to be going on, but no…

Instead, it just suddenly appeared as if the “scaffolding pixies” had dropped by to leave us a gift, and there it remains lurking next to the front of the house in anticipation of “something” although it doesn’t quite give the impression that anyone knows quite what the “something” is as yet.

I do, however, suspect that it’s going to be something expensive…

Still, it’s not as if anyone can really complain (although I’m sure they might), after all there’s still more than enough room for them all to get by just as long as they’re not trying to deliver a grand piano or something. (Pauses as he spots the van from the grand piano company pulling up outside…)

I was a little concerned that one of the bracing struts did seem to have been set in next door’s garden, and I did try knocking on her door to explain just as soon as we got home and saw this steel spider’s web had been erected, but she appeared to be out that evening and I haven’t seen any sign of her since.

I did, of course, mention to her that we “might be having a little work done” when she tracked me down a few weeks ago to tell me that she would be “having a little work done” to her own house a few weeks ago, so it’ll probably be all right… (Pauses to ponder upon the possibility that ALL of the houses in the row are crumbling…)

Anyway, I suppose the rational, reasonable argument goes something along the lines of it being safer to have the scaffolding set up and struggle through a little bit of inconvenience for a couple of weeks rather than have a bloody great lump of stone fall off the house and squash someone, although, on occasions in the past, “rational” and “reasonable” have not been the first words that sprang to mind with certain people in the neighbourhood.

Happily, our immediate neighbours are just about as perfect a you could hope for and, if the weather doesn’t get too grim, and the discoveries that are made whenever somebody does climb that scaffolding tower to investigate aren’t too horrendous, perhaps the imposition won’t be too long-lasting…?

Hopefully…

Fingers crossed, eh…?

Otherwise I might need some scaffolding to hold me up…