It’s been a day of preparation today. Tallulah has gone out with her granny for a birthday shopping treat. As they were leaving I heard her listing her itinerary: a trip to Monsoon, a trip to T.K. Maxx, a spot of lunch at Pizza Express complete with Bambinoccino and maybe a little pop to the old fashioned sweet shop before coming home. My heart swelled with pride. She may be a menace to society but I have dragged her up good and proper when it comes to the fine art of consumer therapy. In the meantime, the rest of us have scrubbed, polished, changed bed sheets, hoovered, cleaned windows etc, all in time for a tribe of sticky five year olds to trash the joint tomorrow. Hooray! Jason has done his fair share and done lots of household jobs, including putting the stair gate back on where Oscar wrenched it from the wall yesterday trying to reach his girls who were most unfairly brushing their teeth without him.
Jason is paralyzed with tiredness, but then it’s entirely self inflicted due to him staying out until the wee small hours playing poker. He’s on his first nap of the day, but this was after an extensive lie in this morning. He says that the lie in doesn’t count due to the fact that we were rather noisy getting up and kept waking him. It’s a hard life. He must have arrived home at about fourish this morning. I know this because I had rather a disturbed night last night myself and it was nothing as glamorous as tripping the light fantastic.
Just as I was getting ready for bed a man and his lady love decided to have a stupendous row right outside our house for about half an hour. I have a feeling intoxicating liquor may have fuelled it. Leaning out of the bathroom window it was quite hard to get the gist of what exactly was going on. But as a budding reporter I felt it was my duty to give it my best shot. There was a lot of effing and blinding. There was a considerable amount of screaming, some frenzied sobbing and a lot of pointy finger type talk with the words ‘you’ and ‘your’ and ‘fault’ coming into play. By the end she was a quivering mass of hysteria and he bared his soul in anguish, shouted: ‘I can’t fuckin’ ‘andle you when yer like this can I?’ and stormed off. I thought he could perhaps have put it more eloquently, but I have to say that I felt for him. He may have been an uncouth, foul mouthed adolescent, but at least he didn’t shriek so loud bats were dropping out of the sky because they thought their sonar was on the fritz. There’s a lot to be said for that.
They moved off, but five minutes later she reappeared, talking nineteen to the dozen to some other poor bloke who had clearly and reluctantly been roped in as a peacemaker. She was speeding down the road, still shrieking at sonic levels and he was trailing behind her rather tragically shouting; ‘You’ve got to admit that you can be a bit of a handful.’ After which there was a deathly silence and I don’t know what happened next. I suspect she karate chopped him in the windpipe and then ate the remains.
I finally got to sleep after all the excitement to be woken by Oscar who had somehow climbed inside his duvet cover, and as a result was very hot, very sweaty and had also lost his dummy. He wailed quite a lot. I think he was probably dreaming of being strangled by a boa constrictor. I hoiked him out, scrabbled round on the floor and found his dummy. That was at two o’clock. What seemed like a nanosecond later I was woken by what sounded like voices on the landing below. I got up after a few minutes to investigate, but all was quiet. Turns out Tallulah had a nightmare and woke Tilly who very kindly went and fetched her teddy bear for her where she had left it downstairs. I had obviously slept through the real drama and only woken up for the finale. In retrospect I was very pleased, although Tilly was rather grumpy this morning.
At half past three I was woken up by a weird thumping noise coming from the garden. I lay in bed listening to it for a few moments and decided that it must be the new gate blowing in the wind. I lay there for a few more minutes, plucking up the will power to go downstairs and shut it before it snapped off. I draggled out of bed and was on the second landing when I heard music through the open bathroom window. It was really, really loud. It turns out that the woman who lives in the bungalow (the ignorant possessor of the elderflower bush) had decided to turn her stereo all the way up to eleven for some reason. The thumping I could hear was not the gate, it was her bass levels vibrating our foundations. I was, as you can imagine, quite annoyed.
I went back to bed and saw that while I had been creeping about the house, Jason had texted me to say that he was on his way home. I rang him and told him that if she was still playing soft rock so loudly that all the elderflower berries were falling off her trees by the time he got home, could he knock on her door and then knock on her until she fell over. He said he would. He came home fifteen minutes later, just as she decided that whatever mad interlude had made her decide to have a nocturnal disco was now over. I went to sleep feeling very irritated, and woke up worried in case she had been murdered in her bed and the murderer had put the music on to cover the sound of her screams. I have been scanning her front door all morning just in case she comes out murdered, but no joy yet. My bathroom mirror is broken this morning. I wonder whether it was the noise from her stereo. If she hasn’t been murdered I may ask for compensation.
Still, it makes a change. I have spent all week spying on her back garden. Now I’m spying on her front.
