Acropropblog

my new kitchen - lovely, isn't it?




I’m beginning really to irritate myself. For those endless two years when we were trying to sell the house I had this mantra that everything would be hunky-dory, ‘when the house sells….’ Everything would be wonderful if we could only get our dream house and move into town, back to civilisation. Well, the house sold, we’re here, where we always wanted to be and am I happy? Am I heck. Admittedly 2008 has been possibly the nastiest year on record since 1970 – and we’re still only four months into the damn thing.
Part of the frustration is not being able to write about it all in lurid detail. Writing has always been my means of working things out of my system and blogging has been the most powerful form of therapy I’ve ever encountered. I think a lot of my black dog blues have been created by the effective gagging order on my writing – that and a deep grinding sadness that my motives were so misunderstood. I’m also flipping furious with myself for being so naïve. Heaven only knows, I’ve had enough warning shots that a Blog is for the World to Read. I guess I have never really really thought that anyone much would be bothered to read my ramblings. But people Google themselves (seemingly with monotonous egocentric regularity) and bingo up pops my darn blog. You know, it had never really occurred to me before to Google myself. Yet bung me into the search box and what do you find? Yup, there I am, splattered all over the Internet, like diarrhoea.

Anyhow, enough already. Let’s talk about something else. Like the Bonkers House. Lately I’ve taken to singing a tuneless little ditty that goes like this…..

Ten green acroprops holding up my wall…..
Ten green acroprops holding up my wall…
And if one green acroprop should accidentally fall…..

We laugh nervously at this little joke but I fear there could be a nasty ring of truth to it (just like Ring a Ring O’Roses viz the Plague). Work continues slowly, so slowly. After the first flurry of excitement, the heady joy of Something Being Done, we seem to have hit one of those endless bogs you encounter in dreams – no matter how hard you trudge, you never seem to arrive anywhere. The firemen are working solidly, doggedly, but the poor house is even more decrepit than we or they imagined – timbers are rotten and need replacing so the whole house looks like one of those stilt huts, held up by slender rods and our collective willpower.
We’re more or less living in one room – tripping over dust sheets, getting on one another’s nerves. The phone is out in the (freezing cold) hallway and yesterday my teeth were literally chattering so hard the person on the other end of the phone had to ask me to repeat myself. Given family issues over the last few months I have barely been able to work so money, inevitably, drags heavy on my soul. I have visions of the cash/credit running out and the whole place gently teetering onto its side and collapsing with a sigh.

We now have scaffolding all along the road side of the house, effectively creating a bottle-neck on the way out of town. Which means, of course, that we’re now living in a doll’s house – open to the world, or at least to the firemen.
‘Five minutes to ETA,’ bellows Adrian at 8.10am and an undignified scramble for the loo ensues. Our loo window is so high up that there have never been curtains or blinds in it – only the pigeons could see in. Not any more. You could easily find yourself, happily ensconced flipping through Homes & Gardens and find a cheery face waving at you. So now I tend to cross my legs or plunge down into the subterranean depths of the Loo of Doom. The seat is sub-zero and the walls ooze damp but at least it’s private.

However today the sun is shining fit to burst. There’s a magnolia (stellata, not my favourite but never mind) flowering its heart out and, even shrouded in dust, the house is putting on a tentative smile. It would be churlish not to smile back, wouldn’t it?