Anyone fancy a bath?
The outdoor experience is so romantic. The rustle of the leaves, the chirping of the birds, the weird conversations people on the footpath just over the hedge are having, the smell of the exhaust from the cars on the street out front, the bellow of the tannoy* from the train station not far enough away, the faint ooooooooo of visiting ghosts from the churchyard, the permanently stuck-on yelling of the terrier next door . . . and of course the exquisite modern found sculpture of your immediate surroundings.
You can’t possibly resist. Queue forms to the right.
I feel that the presence of the skip brings out the je ne sais quoi of the clematis montana.** Without the skip it’s just a . . . garden.***
However I never have to look at this frelling plastic baronial hall chandelier hanging from my ceiling again! Several morale-destroying light fixtures remain intact, unfortunately, but this one had to come down while they replaced the hall ceiling and I said, Yaaaaay! Don’t put it back up again! I said the same thing about the ceiling, which is one of those godsawful textured things†. So now, with the weight-bearing attic floor††, I also have a lovely smooth hall ceiling with a tactful little cocotte††† with a pure simple bit of flex dangling from it.‡ Some year I will find the perfect lamp to replace it with. Not this year.‡‡
* They got the extra-loud system. I bet it was on sale. The sound carries for miles.
** It’s a lovely smelly one too. While you can keep your eyes shut all is well. Unfortunately you have to open them again. Barring training hellhounds as seeing-eye dogs^ and I hope finishing poor Third House is not going to take long enough^^ to make this drastic course worth it.
^ HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA stop you’re killing me
^^ There was a young man stapling some more of the ground-floor ceiling back into place today. I’ve started to worry about how many of the workforce at Third House have proved to be young. What do old builders do? Take up banking?+ Professional golf? Neurosurgery? Or is Third House such small beer that they’re sending all their apprentices for a little unthreatening practise? Will the ceiling stay stapled?
+ Assume cheap joke here about how we certainly don’t want bankers doing it any more
*** Yes! It is! I want it back! Waaaaaaaaaah!
† There’s a specific name for this one, which I can’t remember, so I’ve just been Googling textured ceilings, and to my inexpressible horror there are sites out there which teach you how to texture a ceiling and at least one site that lists houses for sale that possess textured ceilings. No, no, no, no, no . . . I’m going to have to go lie down in a darkened room to recover my equilibrium. . . . ^
^ This raises the awful spectre of possibility that one of you reading this blog likes textured ceilings. If you do, keep it to yourself. Honour might force me to kill your RSS feed.
†† It was mostly old guys that put in the floor, so presumably it is weight-bearing
††† No, no! The second definition! http://www.thefreedictionary.com/cocotte
‡ And–I wouldn’t lie to you about something like this, you know–here are the famous duckie and chickie tiles. Which are also gone, gone, gone! They make much better found sculpture than they did kitchen walls!
‡‡ Unless the reissued SUNSHINE decides to become a best-seller after all. A girl can dream.
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