A Day in the Life

It’s Thursday night already and we have only just finished Tuesday’s crossword. When am I ever supposed to get anything done? Following the rain a couple of weeks ago and the recent hot weather, the garden has exploded into greenery. I used to have an Australian colleague who said that he particularly liked the seasonal extremities here, and specifically how after some warm and wet weather in May and June, everything burst into copious leaf in the space of a few days.

That’s all very well, all very fine and large, I’m sure, but it takes no account of the calls on my time. The lawn has suddenly become knee-height. I should have cut it last weekend, but we had to go to visit Margaret and Andrew in Yorkshire and have a great time drinking lots of beer and eating curry. Look, somebody has to do it. And I was busy the last few days when the weather was magnificent, so that now the grass is even longer but the rain has come down, so I can’t mow it just yet.

Bushes and trees have expanded to more than twice their previous size in a matter of days. On Tuesday, a big woody shrub which had been trained to the garage, got so profuse in its growth that the weight was too much for the training wires and it collapsed onto the lawn. I should have cut that back too last weekend, but for heaven’s sake, I had important business in Yorkshire, as noted above. Anyway, I didn’t have the appropriate gear for repairing the fix to the garage wall, so I have tied it up with a Heath Robinson style combination of bits of old clothes line. It is at least approximately vertical again, but it looks bloody ridiculous. I must fix it up properly some time.

Incidentally, the garage to which the offending triffid is attached has probably not had a car inside it since the end of the second world war or thereabouts. It currently contains four bicycles, several boxes of mouldering, work-related papers, and a tumble drier. And that’s another thing. I have just started the weekly washing marathon. Twenty years ago when there were two adults and two children staying here, we started the weekly wash on Saturday morning and it was finished by around three in the afternoon, when I would repair to the Carpenter’s Arms with my newspaper. Now, with only three (count ‘em) adults staying here, we start the weekly wash on Thursday, finish it on Sunday, and by Wednesday, we can’t get the lid down on the laundry basket.

Talking of the garage, that reminds me of when we moved in here in 1996. The house had this mock-Tudor front and climbing roses by the big bay window. I would occasionally see it out of the corner of my eye as I drove past on Victoria Road, and think, I wonder who the ostentatious git is who lives there? Then one day, there was a For Sale sign… We could only afford to offer five grand less than the asking price, and the owner, a thoroughly miserable old bastard, finally grudgingly accepted our offer. However, he was so monumentally peeved at not getting the full monty for the house, that he took out the modern light fittings and replaced them with old, illegal ones, made sure that carpets, light bulbs, and pretty much everything not actually attached to the building with cement, was removed. He also played a funny joke on us in the kitchen. On the day we moved in, after our first meal, I washed up the dishes, pulled the plug out of the sink, and the dirty water spilled out all over the kitchen floor. When he had unplumbed his dishwasher and washing machine, he had not blocked up the holes in the pipework under the sink into which their outlets fed. Tell you what, if I met him now, I would eat his liver with a Freddo chocolate frog and a nice can of Fanta.

But I digress. What I meant to say was that when we moved in, the garden was magnificent (although it didn’t take long for us to fix that), thanks to the lady of the house, who was apparently a very keen gardener. In a corner of the garage we found a rickety folding chair beside which, on a shelf, was an ashtray, a plate bearing a picture of Pope John Paul the Second, and a set of rosary beads. So presumably, the poor lady would retreat there to get away from her misanthropic swine of a husband, and have a little smoke and a pray.

We’ve got a holiday in Devon and Sussex coming up in a week or so (although looking at infection rates, I do worry that we might have to call it off), and I’ve got to prepare for that. And it is our anniversary on the 30^th, so I have got to brave the crowds in town and buy a present for Madam. It is all go.

And I’ll tell you another thing. My employer appears to think that I should take my jacket off and do the occasional stroke of work to justify my grossly inflated salary. How bloody unreasonable is that? As if I don’t have enough to worry about.

And on top of that, I’ve got this self-inflicted blog to write. What am I going to say to you all? As usual, Duffy has nothing either profound or useful to contribute to the conversation. I realise that there is not a large population of fans eagerly awaiting the latest bon mot, but I feel that if you start something you should finish it. So what can I say other than to acknowledge, in view of the above, the possibility that Linda is right and that I would go mad if I retired?

I know. I have just thought of it. The one thing I want to say in this week’s blog is as follows:

EVERYBODY, EVERYWHERE, HAVE A LOVELY WEEKEND!