Where it all began

Regular readers may know that despite my uber modern appearance (ahem), and heavy reliance on technology, I am in fact a throw back to the Victorian age.  I am a consumptive heroine, coughing her way to an early grave courtesy of the CLD ™, or Chaise Longue of Death, as it is known in the trade.

Yesterday, when I was face down in the filing cabinet looking for important documents and swearing in a muffled way, I found a copy of an e-mail that I sent in July 1995.

At that time I was working as a secretary for a medical publishers.  My main job was sorting out rights and permissions for various scientific publications. In my spare time I was supposed to help the office in general.

Clearly, on this day, I had been ‘helping’ in general.  It seems that there was a dearth of chairs in the meeting rooms, and it was decided that an e-mail should be sent to the entire company asking for people to bring any spare chairs back.  I was given this simple task.

I quote:

‘A chair amnesty has been announced by head office, starting from 07.00 hours this morning.  There will be a small box placed by Maureen’s desk where you can deposit any illicit chairs you have about your person.  Maureen has been sworn to secrecy, and her copy of the official secrets act is now deposited in the vault at Barclay’s Bank for future reference.

Don’t feel embarrassed about the situation, chair fetishism is no new thing.  It is a little known fact that Winston Churchill was in reality only five stone six, his main bulk being attributed to his ‘Security Queen Anne Chaise Longue’ which he had stitched into the lining of his suits to give him confidence when called upon to speak in public.’

I got a written warning for this e-mail.

It wasn’t as bad as the time I got reprimanded for writing an e-mail asking people not to shoot up crack on the sofas in reception, as it was making the place look untidy.

I was clearly not cut out for the world of real work, even then.

Holy, Holy, Holy

Oscar: ‘I’m saying my prayers…’

Tallulah: ‘Yes. That is a good idea.’

Oscar: ‘I am saying them now…Are you ready?’

Tallulah: ‘Yes.’

Oscar: ‘Prayersprayersprayersprayersprayers.’

Housey Housey

It has been a reasonably trying day, with lots of jobs to do and a continual sense of an ever ticking clock pushing us onwards.

We have achieved a lot, but for every one thing we score through on our list, we add another.

Jason and I had an argument this morning.  It was over nothing, and we made up in short order, but it was quite explosive.  We are both hard to get on with, but usually get along with each other way better than we get along with anyone else.  We have debates on a fairly regular basis, but we don’t really yell, as a rule.

This morning was a yell and not a debate.  It was reasonably fierce while it lasted.

We agreed in the end that we were both trying to look out for each other, and had both made bad judgement calls in how best to help each other out. Calls which were actually making life harder than it needed to be.  We agreed to stop helping each other in that way.  Which was useful.

We also agreed that we are not very good at not having a home.  This house has been our home for over three years now, but in the last few weeks we have been detaching from it, and it no longer feels like it is ours.  We do not do rootless very well, which is funny for people who move house so often.

We are fine, we have decided, as long as there is somewhere in the world that we think of as our home, and where we can retreat when things are rough.  We like to shut the door and nest.

Things are fairly rough at the minute what with all our stresses and strains, and we do not have a ‘home’ in which to lick our wounds.  We have a house, and that is not the same thing at all.

I understand now why backpacking round the world for twelve months has never appealed to me.  I like travelling. I like going on holidays, but I hate feeling rootless, and I really don’t like not having my stuff around me.

Still, we must bear up and be brave.  Hopefully, if there are no more terrible surprises waiting to leap out and karate chop us in the wind pipe, we will have a new house in three weeks, and then we get to set about making it feel like our home.

For twelve months at least.

DJ Aethelred In Da House

I am still reading medieval history in between all the other things I am perusing.  Education has not totally fallen by the wayside.  It is merely resting for a moment or two.

I am slowing down because I have library books to finish.  I have actually finished Clarissa Dickson Wright’s ‘Rifling Through My Drawers’, which I didn’t enjoy much, unlike her first book, which made me hoot with laughter at how un PC and forthright she is.  This just seemed a trifle contrived.

I am also three quarters of the way through Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis, which I love.  I am having to resist rushing out to get all his other books.  As I have to move house on Wednesday morning, ordering things from Amazon now would be insane.  This is the only thing that has stopped me.  Auntie Mame is a kind of American Cold Comfort Farm, or something Nancy Mitford would have written were she born on the other side of the pond.  It gets a huge thumbs up from me.

Anyway, back to Medieval times.  There are two things I have been mulling over in my tiny brain when the thought of all the things I have to do and haven’t yet even started gets me down.  First is the subject of Saint’s Relics. 

I am intrigued by relics. 

Having been dragged through the Catholic education system, despite my parents being religious hippies who were christened three times each so their mother’s could get shot of them to as many Sunday Schools as would have them, and not from any firm religious conviction, I am quite interested in the more colourful aspects of Catholicism.

I remember at the Convent school having quite a crush on Padre Pio, a relatively modern saint who was known in his lifetime for having the stigmata (where your hands/feet/sides bleed in sympathy with Christ’s wounds on the cross).  I thought this was quite cool. I would have liked to meet him.  He sounded way more interesting than the Good Samaritan for instance, who seemed to be a sanctimonious prig wearing a t-towel.

Once, when I was in Italy as a teenager visiting my aunt, we took a trip to the town of Lanciano in the Abruzzi mountains.  We visited a  church which  claimed to have a slice of the heart of Jesus on display. Not only was it on display, it also spontaneously performed miracles.  Clearly this was too good to miss.  We stumbled into the darkened church and peered at it fiercely.  It was sandwiched between two bits of glass, rather like a specimen ready to go under the microscope.  Apparently on important occasions it would bleed real drops of Christ’s blood. Sadly, I have no way of proving this, as my visit was clearly not deemed special enough for even the tiniest hint of moisture to come trickling out.

Later, also in Italy, with UE on honeymoon I dragged him into a church in one of the innumerable cities we visited, because it had a saintly relic.  It had, to be precise, the finger of a saint.  Not only did it have this saint’s finger, it had it mounted on a golden stick encrusted with jewels.

Now I don’t know about you, but to me that is a very exciting thing indeed.  It was very pointy, and did indeed look like a gnarled, yellowing finger on a giant golden stick, unlike the slice of heart, which actually looked like a bit of tinned spam under glass.  If I had been a nun with the keys to the finger cupboard I’d have been forever getting it out to poke people with or knock their mitres of with, and then run away, sniggering.

You can see now, why I was never really invited to be at one with the Catholic church.  Much too irreverent.

Anyway, in this book I was talking about the other day, The Death of Kings, the author elaborated on the subject of relics, and mentioned that everyone in those days was absolutely mad keen on them.  It was like the craze for Pokemon trading cards, but better.  Quite often, kings who people thought were quite holy, or just annoying enough to the new king to be useful to a cause, would be turned into saints shortly after their death. 

In order to become a saint you have to have done some miracles first.  There were a lot more saints in the Middle Ages, because of course it was a lot easier to be miraculous.  There was absolutely heaps of stuff that nobody had thought of doing then that is actually dead easy, but nobody had quite got round to fitting in, what with all the dying of plagues and worrying about burning in hell they had to fit in.  Probably making a cheese sandwich would have caused you to be canonised quicker than you could say ‘pass the Wensleydale.’  Either that, or burned as a witch.  These days you don’t stand a chance unless you’re religion’s answer to Stephen Hawking.  The bottom has dropped right out of the saint market.

Zounds.

So, if a king stood even a faint chance of being made into a saint, and relics were big news, it stood to reason that before the king went into his coffin, every relic hunter in the land would be chasing round after the body, accidentally bumping into it with big, sharp knives, hoping that vital bits would drop off.

Harsh, but fair.

It got so bad, that if a king died a long way from his final resting place, they had to escort the body there with armed guards to stop the relic crazed mob from stripping him down for spare parts.  He should count himself lucky.  These days, if that were the case, his ear lobes would be on E-bay before the sun went down.

To elaborate just how vicious the scrum for body parts could get the author illustrated his point with the tale of a chap called St. Hugh of Lincoln.  Apparently he had managed to get a viewing of Mary Magdalene’s body and was so overcome by the idea of having a part of her, probably fairly odiferous person, that he took the liberty of biting her nose off to ensure that a) nobody else could have it, and b) he could get it home without anyone taking it off him.

Ewww.

A little bit stalkerish these relic collectors don’t you think? I wonder if that’s why monks had tonsures in those days? It wasn’t a matter of religious conviction at all, it was probably them selling locks of hair round the back of the herb garden on the offchance that they might get canonised for inventing the unicycle or doing those funny farty noises under their arms.

So, you can see how that topic has kept me merrily occupied for some time.

The other thing that has been intriguing me is this subject of kingly names, or indeed names for anyone in the Medieval public eye.  Lots of people in those days were known as something  the something.  I have already posted previously on the wonderfully named, Roderick the Fat (or was it Gregory? I know it was ‘the fat’ for sure).  You can also take Edward the Confessor or Alfred the Great as examples.  Now these two names aren’t bad, but they’re quite unusual for the time.

There seems to have been much more popularity for unflattering names, often ones which emphasised something really bloody stupid you had done or were known for, or which made much of a physical problem that you probably didn’t want anyone else to think about, and hoped that nobody would notice, only to find that twenty years down the line you are going down in history as Pepin the Short or Aethelred the Unready. 

You’d be gutted, wouldn’t you?

The closest I can come to a modern equivalent is this craze for having a DJ name. 

It’s astonishing how the past repeats itself really.

I’m looking forward to the day when I can take my grandchildren to see M.C. Aelfric and his finger on a stick.

It’s all happening here

This blog is behaving very oddly, which is probably a reflection upon my life in general.  It looks very strange as I type, but when I preview it, it looks fine.  Maybe that is a deeper metaphor for what is going on. I don’t know. I just know that I am finding it weirdly unnerving.

Still, needs must when the devil is wanting to move into your house.

As you know, we have been having a little bother with the purchasers of this house, and the date they decided they needed to move house by, i.e. next Friday.

I stuck my heels in.  Jason stuck his heels in.  We instructed our solicitor to stick her heels in.  We were getting nowhere.  We had sore heels, and rage induced, teeth grinding headaches.

We were also informed that the purchasers wished to come round and measure up for furniture, curtains etc.  You usually do this much earlier on in the whole process.  We just took this as another sign of their peculiarity, but agreed that they could come round last night, and agreed between ourselves that I would take the children away so I didn’t lose my temper and disgrace us all, and the  children didn’t get in anyone’s hair.

We decamped to granny’s house, where it appears we will be spending a significant part of the next month.

When we got back yesterday evening and had put the children to bed, I got the skinny.

Basically they turned up with sheaves of e-mails and phone records of calls they had been making to their solicitor for weeks, trying to get us to commit to a date and firm things up etc.  They thought we were being gits because we weren’t replying.

We weren’t replying because our solicitor wasn’t informing us of any of this and had withheld information like the fact that they had told their solicitor, who had informed our solicitor of their proposed completion date over a month ago.  And because our solicitor wasn’t giving us any of the relevant information, we thought they were being gits.

It turns out that they want to move as desperately as we do and are in a worse situation than us.

This is very annoying.  Our solicitor is entirely at fault and has left us no leg to stand on. We got all the forms to her as soon as she sent them to us. It transpires that when she got them back, she sat on them.  This is why they are only just at the stage of talking to us about fixtures and fittings and measurements etc, thanks to the fact that she has only just given them the documents we filled in over six weeks ago.

They are truly in a worse situation than we are in terms of being pushed for moving time, and if we don’t complete next Friday then they genuinely will have to walk away from the sale. 

We cannot afford for this to happen.  This house is at the ceiling price for our road, and also at the ceiling price for the next tranche of stamp duty.  There are still six other houses on our road which have not sold.  Unless the economy picks up miraculously or they alter the stamp duty levels we are not going to better what we achieved for this house in the next five to ten years.

We need to sell the house if we ever want to even think of achieving our move to Canada.  Despite the difficulties we are facing now, the likelihood of finding another buyer this close to Christmas, with no chain and cash is slim to none.

We have to bite the bullet and go ahead with next Friday.

It is insane.

It is also going to cost us serious money to put our property in storage for the two weeks between when we need to move out and when our new house will be ready for us to move into.

I have not sorted anything out, and have until next Wednesday morning to get everything in order, as this is when the removals firm are now turning up.

And we still haven’t exchanged.  We are taking it all on trust.

It is making me feel sick with anxiety.

Pray for me, or do whatever it is you do to ensure good luck.  I need to get through the next week without having a stress induced heart attack, and get this house sold once and for all.

Of Sainthood and Snot

I am hiding from The Apprentice.  I hate The Apprentice with a passion.  Alan Sugar’s face looks like a passion fruit in a wig, and I cannot be doing with all that barking and harrumphing.  It just irritates me.

I need my television to be soothing.  I do not pay my licence fee to be irritated by people. I get that for free at home, on a moment by moment basis.

So, I am hiding, with my book, and my scrunched up, itchy, gritty eyes.

Yes, God has seen fit to smite me for my petulance and failure to conform with EU regulation 31423232 sub-section 5, entitled: ‘Appropriate behaviour for women approaching their mid-life crisis’.

I have conjunctivitis.

I woke up this morning thinking I had gone blind in my left eye when I could not unglue my eyelashes.  Yerk.

Now I have it in both eyes.

I suppose you can call this progress of a sort.  And at least I do not have a headache for the first time in four days.  I am now just full of mucous.  It is leaking out of my eyes and nose simultaneously.  Even the judicious application of a bowler hat has not helped me any today.

It reminds me of this:

So, things have been very slow at the ranch.  It has been an official sick day.  Nothing much to be done.  Mostly I have eaten carbohydrates in gargantuan quantities, and read Mr. Men books to my son.  I am undecided as to whether Roger Hargreaves was a genius or an idiot.  Possibly an idiot savant.  The stories are weak beyond belief, the drawings could be executed by a half witted eight year old, and yet somehow those books work, and can be classified as enduring classics. I know this to be true because we borrowed some Mr. Men books we hadn’t got from granny’s house earlier in the week, and when I started to read Mr. Uppity to Oscar this afternoon, it was my infant hand that had written my name on the inside front cover.  The book must be about 34 years old.

Blimey O’Reilly’s trousers.

If you have Mr. Men obsessed children in your life, the Book People are doing a fantastic deal where you can get fifty Mr. Men books in a box set for £30.00.  I have just ordered it for Oscar for Christmas. The day it arrives is bound to be the point at which he decides he hates them and will never have their names mentioned again.  I may be e-baying it shortly if this is the case.

The book I am currently reading is probably not going to be considered a classic, unlike Mr. Uppity.  I am wading my way through Michael Evans’s tome, entitled: ‘The Death of Kings: Royal Deaths in Medieval England.’  Now I thought this showed promise.  It read as if it would be both intellectual and yet salacious, and full of good, gossipy anecdotes about gruesome kingly deaths.  I like a good gruesome kingly death.  It cheers me up.

It sort of is, in places, but in others it is just baffling.  In the first chapter for instance, he tries to compare our rate of kingly deaths and the length of their reigns with other royal houses in Europe.  I sort of understand why, but I do not understand why he decided he had to spend several pages working out average reigns.  You cannot have an average reign, you either reigned for this long, or you didn’t.  Knowing the average doesn’t really alter the fact that in one particularly horrific century we bumped off more kings in more unpleasant ways than anyone else in Europe, but that if we take the average over a couple of hundred years and discount the fact that this king had a fifty year reign and that bloke had a cat called Montmorency, and if we look at it with the eye of faith it’s not too bad.

Ha!

There are some good bits though.  I read this the other day which pleased me enormously:

‘the descriptions of the dead bodies of kings can be contrasted with the early thirteenth-century miracle story of the aptly named Christina the Astonishing, who died, but who was miraculously restored to life in the middle of her funeral service.  The revived Christina found the smell of the congregation offensive, and attempted to escape it by levitating to the roof of the church.  She was persuaded down by the priest, and related to the astonished congregation that she had died, visited purgatory and been recalled to life.  She was afterwards blessed (or cursed) with a partiuclarly acute sense of smell, and spent much of her life attempting to avoid the smell of human beings by hiding up trees, in the rafters of churches or in ovens.’

They just don’t make saints like they used to, do they?

Mind you, they won’t be canonising me for anything like that at the minute.  My sense of smell has been drowned by the copious amounts of snot I am emitting.

I shall try for sainthood a different way.

Perhaps I will be sainted for single handedly reviving the fashion for wearing bowler hats and shouting irritably at people in the street?

Paradise Lost (to gnomes)

The gnomes went into their annual hibernation the day before yesterday. 

Despite years of disappointment when the gnome house inevitably turns to mush in the miserable winter weather, we are still using our trusty old friend cardboard as the major building component.  I have tried to sway them to other materials, but they will not learn.

I shall not be allowing them to build my retirement bungalow.  No, ‘Bide a Wee’ will be a strictly cardboard free zone.

I shall be having it built out of Pop Tarts which are past their sell by date, set on a firm foundation of Twinkies.  If I plait the roof out of cockroach carcasses it will have a half life of a millennia and become a lasting monument to my greatness.

So, the gnomes have retired for their winter sojourn.

This year they received a bath before being placed in the new gnome palace.  It was no ordinary bath.  It was a Roman bath, with Oscar and Tilly as the attendants:

Here they are waiting for the bath:

Salvete gnomes.  I would put the Latin for gnomes, but somehow I don’t think they played a major part in the rise and fall of the Roman empire.  Much like bananas, they were a thing that could be dreamed of, or even foretold in the twisting sheep entrails of fortune, but not enjoyed until centuries later.  A shame.

It was while I was photographing them patiently waiting in line that I noticed these two suspects:

who I find deeply troubling, and who I cannot remember having seen before.

I thought they might be interlopers.  I asked Tilly, who casually said: ‘Oh yes.  They’re new, sort of.  They’re clown things.’

Well yes, they are clown things.  I am not impressed of them. I will be keeping my beady eye on them in future.  Jazz frog seems a friendly sort, and I wouldn’t mess with him anyway, bein’ as how he’s nearly as big as me, but these two little demons are just far too creepy for my liking.

Hmmm.

Standards seem to be slipping in the gnome sanctuary.  It appears granny is letting in any old riff raff these days.

Anyway, I shall not get a chance to police them properly until the spring, as they are now safely ensconced here with the mouse murdering owls and the ragged assortment of gnomes:

It looks vaguely Roman too, don’t you think? Clearly all that stuff on Roman town planning is obviously percolating around in her brain somewhere.  I like that this year Sissy and Leera have been left outside to guard the building, like that’s going to stop it disintegrating in the first good downpour we get.  I also like the fact that their scarves are actually a spare pair of Tilly’s socks.  Granny is much more liberal with her socks than me.

That’s why we have granny’s.  Because they let us eat coco-pops for breakfast, they have red slippers, and they allow us to get creative with our socks.

Tuesday happened today. I was there for bits of it

I was not going to blog today. I thought I might mope instead.

Then I changed my mind.

Why keep my mopes to myself?

Mainly I have a headache. I have pointed this out already on Facebook.  Mrs. Jones is unimpressed that I have another one.  Not as unimpressed as me.  I am thoroughly unimpressed.  This one has been looming on and off for four days. I feel like crap. I cannot tell if it is eye strain, stress, a migraine of mammoth proportions looming, or a cold coming, because my throat hurts and everything also tastes funny.  About the only thing I am sure of is that I am not pregnant.

Thank God.

It has been another crazy day.  I spent most of the morning talking to schools in the area we are moving to.  The convent, where I went as an uneducated atheist weirdo, does not want my better educated, Buddhist leaning weirdo daughter because she is not a ‘baptised Catholic.’  I thought they had gotten more friendly since all the nuns left.  It appears not.  If she were a baptised Catholic they would find a space for her.  For the non Catholics among us there is a waiting list.  I do not want to be on it.

I am quite glad they have made my decision for me. I was in two minds.  The only reasons I put it on the list were because it has an outstanding Ofsted report and there is a bus from the village where we will be living.  I hated it there. It was the school at which I was most miserable, and that’s saying a lot, because I was fairly darn miserable at the school after that too.

We have an appointment to look at the only other school on my list next Wednesday.  It is out of our catchment area.  I feel I may well have to home school longer than planned. Darn.

We are also going to see Tallulah’s primary school.  I have no real worries about that school. My mum still teaches there. The head is very nice and she assures me that there are places available in Tallulah’s year.  We have decided to go and look anyway. I want a nosey. I went to primary school there, and haven’t really had a proper poke round since about 1982.  It’s probably changed a lot.  I’m guessing it will seem a lot smaller.

In the meantime, back at the ranch, I made a decision to abandon the curriculum of the school we really want Tilly to go to, which is now utterly out of the question.  I am launching into the world of home eduction all on my lonesome and doing what I do best, which is making it up.  It has taken a lot of pressure off me.  I will continue with the math’s tutor as she needs to be able to count up her donkey money.  We will continue with English, because I hear it might be useful.  We have dropped music like a hot rock.  We are both relieved.  We were not enjoying music at all.

This afternoon’s lessons consisted of me dragging Oscar and Tilly round town while I did nine million errands, including buying more sensible boots for this winter:

Note I did not use the word sensible in an unqualified way.  They are comfortable, have a heel I can walk in, and are not going to aggravate the neighbours or fill up with water after three seconds.  This is good.

Then we went to the charity shop and bought all the fixings for making our own Halloween costumes.  Not me. I do not indulge.  But we got Tallulah some witchy things, Oscar a blue ghosty thing (a bed sheet) and Tilly chose some things to make herself into a blue, sparkly dragon.  Then we came home and made them.  That was a good lesson.

Other momentous decisions made today include the fact that I am now dressing as I please rather than as I think a 38 year old woman who has the cares of the world on her shoulders should look.  I have turned heads at school in the playground:

and not in a good way:

this is a little less out there:

I don’t really care.  Buggerem.

I am also remaining stubborn about our moving date after more nonsense from the solicitor.  I am being Violet Elizabeth. Jason is translating this into how nice people speak to each other instead of stressed out harpies wearing bowler hats, and it is moving forwards.  At this point my attitude is: ‘I would rather burn my house to the ground with everything in it rather than give you an inch.’  Jason is more reasonable.  This is why he is allowed out in public and I’m not.

The slums of Leicester have been dashed by the wayside in favour of painkillers and plangent moaning.

It is not a fair exchange.

I shall sulk under my hat.

Although come to think of it, perhaps it is the unaccustomed weight of my new hat that is causing my head to ache.

I shall investigate further and report.

Tomorrow I will remember to tell you about the gnomes. I promise.

Here, there and everywhere

A weird day in which I have been busy and then not busy, and then not busy in a busy style way, and it is now half past seven, I have not had any tea and am exhausted to the point of hysteria.  I also have paid work to do, and no will whatsoever to do it.

I have finally collected my lovely parcel of hair gunk products courtesy of Liberty London Girl. It has taken me a week to get to the post office depot.  A week.  I have unwrapped the parcel, stared at the contents of it with a mixture of joy and consternation, and then put them on the bathroom shelf for ‘later’.  When this ‘later’ might be is a troubling thought.

I have remembered that Tilly cannot do her maths homework until I buy her a protractor.  I drove like a loon to Staples to buy said protractor, and accidentally on purpose bought lots of shiny pens for a craft project that may or may not happen depending on if I can ever get my shit together again.

I remembered that even though I bought milk yesterday, we had nearly drunk it all and a friend was coming for coffee.  I also remembered that I needed to buy a gift for her husband as he has just landed a great job and we are all thrilled for him.  I hurtled round to the Co-op, where I found they also sold shiny pens and protractors.  Curses!  If only I had done my chores the other way around.

I got home.  I taught a poetry class alongside dealing with the window cleaner, cleaning three toilets, putting on a load of laundry and scraping rice krispies off the kitchen tiles.

My friend came round.  In under an hour we caught up on nearly a month’s worth of news, gossip and general nonsense while she straightened my hair for me, and I remembered to give her the present that I had previously remembered to buy for her husband.

I made lunch.

We drove to granny’s house.  I have not seen granny for weeks.  I have missed her terribly.  While we remembered what each other looks like the children sorted out the annual gnome hibernation in a very educational way (more of which later, with pictures), ran around with tights on their heads pretending to be rabbits, and created and acted in a play entitled ‘Modern Hamlet’.  When I tell you it also starred a woman called Hermione (pronounced Her mee own eee) and an arch villain called Moriarty, you will understand why I cried with laughter. It also featured tights quite heavily.

I rang County Hall Education Department and informed them of our impending move.  They gave me lots of pointers about how to go about moving the kids into a different school etc.  I must spend much time on the phone tomorrow it seems.  At least I now have a loose plan around which to start weaving things and stuff and stuff and things.

We drove home.  Jason called me to say he was stuck in traffic and not only that but had just received a phone call from our solicitor saying that our purchaser’s solicitor had finally deigned to get in touch to say that they wish to complete and MOVE IN on the 15th of October.  YES.  THE FIFTEENTH. 

That is in ten days time.

After weeks of us asking for, and failing to be given a completion date, and us finally deciding last week to work to the date that our house owner wishes to move out on, which is the 29th October, we get a date.

A ludicrously stupid, and unachievable date.

Our answer will be NO.

This is not possible.  We have no removal men booked because they have failed to give us any indication of a time they wish to move.  We have nothing except a date three weeks away.  I am not prepared to bust my chops to move into my parents house and stick all my furniture in storage for two weeks only to have to move house again.  No. No. NO.

To say that I am unimpressed is an understatement.

Still, after weeks of them dragging their heels it finally seems like we are getting somewhere, and if it doesn’t all blow up in our faces we will be moving home in three weeks time, just after half term.

Should I survive that long.

In the meantime, to ensure I survive the rest of the evening I must go and find a way to wake up, feed myself and embark on some work. 

Hooray.

Titfer

You may have noticed in the previous post that there is a bowler hat loose in our house.

It is mine.

Thanks to my lovely parents.

I love it.

I look very stupid in it.  I still love it.

Then today, when I was supposed to be buying sensible winter boots in T.K. Maxx and getting depressed because the only ones I liked were Jill Sander ones at £200, admittedly reduced from £500, and then getting even more depressed when they didn’t fit unless I smashed my ankle bones with a toffee hammer, Jason bought me these:

No. Not a new pair of legs.  A pair of luminous green Doc Martens.

I love them passionately.

There was a time in my late teens and early twenties when I lived in DM’s.  I could not imagine life when I would not own a pair, or several pairs.  I even wore them to my graduation.  I wore them with everything and to everything.  They are an incredibly comfortable shoe, and at that time it was becoming fashionable to have them in all manner of colour.  At one time I had purple ones. They were my most treasured possession.

I have not owned a pair for nearly twenty years now.  Every time I see someone wearing some, or look at them in a shop I feel a frisson of nostalgia mixed with guilt for having forsaken them.

And now I have a pair again.  An in your face pair.  A pair that is not sensible, and will not go gently into that good night.  A pair that kicks and screams and shines.

Yay!

Don’t get me wrong. I’d still murder my first born for a pair of Louboutins, but while I am waiting these will do nicely.

And now I look like this:

and although I am still tired, and exhausted, and ill, and the wonderful bag of hair products that the divine and kind Liberty London Girl sent me to help me with my recalcitrant hair is still sitting in the sorting office waiting for me to find the time to pick it up, I feel good.  Better than I have done for quite a while.

I don’t know if it’s the hat or the boots. I think it’s probably both.

You should try it.

It works.