Another of Those Days
First I overslept. This would be a good thing except for the time it takes.* Then we stopped at Third House on our way out of town for our (late) morning hurtle to beg Atlas’ assistance in putting up the Winter Table. Six months of the year now at the cottage I have a small kitchen . . . and six months of the year I have a Large Table next to the Aga with nearly enough space to edge around it to get from the sitting room to the stairs. Long time readers of this blog will remember The Winter Table: Atlas built it last year to fit over the hellhound crate—which is quite big enough already, in a kitchen about the size of a filing cabinet—and sturdy enough to hold potted plants. We’re due a frost tonight. The summerhouse at Third House got its bubblewrap lining put up just last week for its new incarnation as a heated greenhouse . . . but noooooo of course I haven’t got my geraniums and begonias dug up and ready to put in it.** The easily portable stuff will stay here at the cottage . . . and sit on The Table at need. At least I won’t have a sitting room jungle this year.*** And I still have 1,000,000 bulbs to plant. Another box arrived today. I’m sure I–even I–didn’t order this many.
But while I was at Third House Atlas and I contemplated the Placement of Bookshelves . . . and we carried the big kitchen table from the old house upstairs into the attic. Yaay. You will remember that I spent all this time, money and screaming on a weight-bearing attic floor at Third House for Peter’s and my backlist. This is all a ruse really. I bought Third House and then put in a proper attic to give me somewhere to put two gigantic pieces of furniture from the old house. We kept one nice piece of gigantic furniture each and pretty much everything else got sold or distributed among the family. But we were left with the kitchen table, which Peter built out of an extremely motley collection of bits, and the big thing-with-shelves which was also in the old kitchen, which Peter calls a dresser and I would have called a hutch till I learnt to call it a dresser, which was probably the Ikea of its day. Neither of these was saleable and they’re both too frelling big to fit into normal houses. I couldn’t bear the idea of their ending up on a tip somewhere or being scrounged as firewood. So I actually paid storage on them† for a couple of years . . . till I bought Third House. The dresser unexpectedly fits rather well in the dining room. †† The table has been a rather more gnarly problem. But as soon as the architect said, you’re going to have to put a dormer in because building regs are going to require you to have x amount of head space at the top of the frelling stairs building regs are also requiring you to put in, I thought, dormer! The kitchen table can go under the dormer! Which is the consummation now splendidly fulfilled.
But it wasn’t easy. Ungleblarg frell. Atlas had taken the top off and carried it up already but it took two of us to finagle the legs on their chassis of old door-frames around the tight 360 degrees of the stairs††† and we were wedged in without hope of reprieve about three times as it was. But it’s up there now, mainly due to Atlas’ tactical eye. Now we have to get the mattresses‡ out of the way and start carrying up the eighty boxes of backlist. . . . ‡‡
By this time the hellhounds are beginning to despair. I leap back into Wolfgang and we drive out to our old village, because we still use the petrol station/mechanic there. In the first place, they’re the best we have locally, and in the second place, I don’t want to know anything about cars. I just want the critter to run, and I don’t feel like breaking in a new garage to this philosophy. Wolfgang has a slow leak in a rear tyre‡‡‡.
I ended up buying a new tyre. This was not the plan. It also took a lot longer than merely applying the little hissy thing to the valve in the tyre in question. Hellhounds by this time have finished despairing and are lying across the back seat in attitudes similar to the lower figures on Mr Earbrass’s epergne.§ When I finally stop somewhere that has some landscape around it they emerge looking like the prisoners in Fidelio.§§
It has not been the greatest day any of us has ever had.§§§ And while we had about ten people at Old Eden’s practise tonight, only three of us could actually ring anything. I spent the evening reminding myself that I like giving something back toward the furtherance of the art form that has absorbed deplorable amounts of my time in the last five years, and of how I used to long to be one of those obviously-bored-out-of-their-minds-but-dutiful-and-stalwart capable ringers back in my days as a beginner. How quickly one forgets.
And speaking of beginnerishness, my voice lesson is tomorrow. Eeep.
I also start in again on PEGASUS tomorrow. Eeeeeeep.
* * *
* This is a bit like housework. It’s not the housework I mind, it’s the time it takes. I am enjoying my fabulously well hoovered stairs however. They’re staying well hoovered for longer than usual because they were actually . . . hoovered.^ I’ve spent five years in this house mostly using a stiff brush on the carpets because hoovers make me nuts. I even have one of those dog-and-cat-hair vanquishing jobs for when surfaces begin to give the impression of being felted, but . . . mostly I use a brush. Then I fell for the ecstatic paeans to the glory of the latest little handheld thingummy. These are customers on a web site actually signing back on to wax rhapsodic about a vacuum cleaner. I was impressed enough I bought the thing. And . . . it’s true, the carpets at the cottage are a lot cleaner on a regular basis than they used to be. But nobody mentioned that the thing is literally deafening.^^ It now has its own dedicated set of ear plugs. I tuck their little box into a coil of the flex when I put it back in its cupboard.
^ All right vacuumed. I like hoovered better. It sounds like what happens. HOOOOOOOOOOOvering.
^^ Also the emptying mechanism is insane.+ But that’s a bit like saying cars have four wheels.++
+ First the plastic butt doesn’t want to come off, and when you finally pry it off with violence and imprecations something that looks like one of Eliza Doolittle’s hats in My Fair Lady springs out at you, begging to be released from the durance vile of being a vacuum cleaner filter, and then refuses pointblank to be tamped back into the aperture it just abandoned. And you have to do this a lot.
++ Except Robins. No, really. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliant_Robin
And I realise the guy is the bad guy but I still love this story: http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Sky-News-Archive/Article/20080641038667
** Nor have I actually bought the heater yet.
*** I did post photos of the sitting room jungle last year, didn’t I? I still dream about it occasionally . . . the green tendril winding up the stair banisters, the delicate leafy touch on the back of my neck as I sit at my computer. . . .
† We paid storage. Peter pays a rather high price in a variety of ways for being married to someone who is fun to watch.
†† It mostly seems to have books on it.
††† I will bet you that it would have been a whole lot easier to angle it through the old trap door. Stairs are for sissies. And city council building reg administrators.
‡ There’s quite a lot of ‘can’t do this till we do this first, and there isn’t room to do this first’ going on at the minute. One of the beds goes up into the attic too, but the bigger one with the spring, which is presently in the sitting room providing a facing for the backlist, goes in the bedroom that is now full of the stuff that used to be in what used to be a bedroom and is now stairs. I trust you followed all that.
‡‡ Maybe we’ll just leave the mattresses where they are for a while.
‡‡‡ Modern tyres are dreck. The rubber^ they’re made out of makes Styrofoam look tough and resilient. And I spend far too much of my, or anyway Wolfgang’s, time bouncing over unpaved ruts.
^ If they made condoms out of this stuff there would be a lot more baskets left on a lot more church steps.+
+ Yes, I’m very fond of Victorian novels. Why do you ask?
§ Edward Gorey. Readers of this blog really should know Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel. There will be a test later.
§§ They don’t sing nearly so well though.
§§§ And I still have to bring a Tableful of plants indoors. This will involve stumbling around in the dark, cursing, and tripping over hellhounds.
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