Come Undone

On Thursday morning we had the meeting with Pete the plumber. My emotional response to aspects of the house I’m unhappy with is always the same; on the day it is discovered I am always extremely angry and frustrated but by the time I get to actually meet that tradesman I’ve calmed down and resigned myself to the fact that that aspect of the house will be far from the way I want it. He explained why some of the things were the way they were, some of which we accepted and some we asked to be altered. It’s quite clear he now just sees as overly fussy or having more money than sense. I wanted to point out how apparent this was but I’m really tired of it all now and just want it finished. There came a point several weeks ago where I realised that the reward of the finished house would not be worth the sacrifices made to achieve it. It couldn’t be worth the months of working seventy hours a week, moving out, the endless discussions, negotiations and tolerance of incompetence.

A little later in the day I headed north to Hull where I was working the next day. I can’t explain why but I have great affection for Hull. We lived there for two and half years and really enjoyed our time there despite it being in the top five of all of those ‘car crime’, ‘teenage pregnancy’ and ‘obesity’ type league tables. Since someone else was paying this time I was staying at the Express by Holiday Inn which is part of the St. Stephens shopping complex in the city centre. I checked in with one of the twelve to fourteen year olds at reception, collected my things from the car and went to room 304.

I’ve known people to lose their temper, their mind or lose their shirt playing poker but somewhere around eight O’clock I discovered that I had lost my suit trousers. I had carried them from the car on a hanger but somewhere between there and the room they had made a bid for freedom. My heart sank and it’s possible I began to unravel slightly. It seems that tiredness, overwork and stress either makes you make bad decisions, lose concentration or become highly incompetent. This can be blamed on the renovations too since somewhere in the storage I have a proper suit bag and hanger. I rushed out to explore the car park but there weren’t any trousers out there. You often see a pair of children’s mittens on a fence post, found and placed there by a friendly stranger so I was hoping to find my suit trousers kindly placed somewhere. They weren’t to be found. I asked the security men patrolling the car park if they’d noticed any trousers on the ground. When I mentioned trousers one of them lowered his eyes to my legs, as if each of us only has one pair. “Not these, another pair” I told him. I also asked one of the twelve to fourteen year olds on reception. No trousers. And then David Cameron appeared on the television proclaiming my life to be a natural disaster. Perhaps Gary Barlow would organise a charity concert for me. I hope Midge Ure doesn’t spend the next twenty five years claiming it was his idea. This was a dilemma. I couldn’t really work the next day wearing only my shirt, tie and suit jacket or even this plus my jeans. This was fine, though. One of the biggest Tesco stores in the country was less than a five minute walk away and I’d go there to buy some new trousers. Going to the Oxfam clothing bank was an option but I didn’t have anyone to hold onto my ankles. Aldi wasn’t option. They’re great for groceries and the randomness of some of the other items they offer; electric drill, exercise equipment, self assembly wind turbine etc but not suit trousers.

So I went to Tesco. They had a selection of suits, some for as little as £29 but these were made for people with the strangest measurements. Also, for every fifteen jackets there was only one pair of trousers so there was a limited choice. I’m not a natural shopper and would rather slam my genitals in a car door than enter a fitting room but I couldn’t risk buying a pair in my size and finding that they didn’t fit in the morning. I chose some black ones, shiny black ones which were priced at £10 which must speak volumes about their quality. I’m not sure what the material was but I’d be sure to keep them away from naked flames. In the end I tried on four pairs. I do know my waist and leg sizes so the first pair should have been a perfect fit but wouldn’t go much higher than my thighs. The waist sizes increased in relation to leg measurements but as more and more material gathered around my middle the gap between the end of the trouser and my shoes didn’t seem to close. The pair I finally bought was four inches bigger than I know my waist to be and three inches longer than my legs are. They were huge around the waist but that was the only pair I could find that were close to being long enough and yet still flashed a hint of sock. With a slight change in my eating and exercising habits I’ve lost a stone and a half in the last three months but clearly my volume has remained the same and as I’ve lost weight I’ve gained height. What are these numbers on the labels supposed to relate to since they don’t represent measurements? I think this is really poor. Five year olds in Peru are being paid £3 a month to make these things and so should make the effort to work to a higher standard. I paid and returned to the hotel.

I had noticed it before I went out on my shopping trip but maybe I was in a better, calmer mood then but the people in the room next to me were making a lot of noise. He clearly knew other people staying in the hotel and was either trying to communicate with them by shouting up to the floor above or out of the window. He was coming and going from the room a lot and letting the door bang shut rather than pulling it to and turning the handle. He was doing this a lot. I guessed that he had come to a hotel to celebrate learning to walk upright that day. This may sound unreasonable of me but I was tired, had been up late the previous night, up early that day and wanted to be reasonably fresh for work the next day. On Wednesday evening we had gone to see Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy in concert. Sometimes people meet your expectations, sometimes they fall well below them (Alistair McGowan) and sometimes the quality of their singing and musicianship leaves you spellbound. The music of The Divine Comedy is almost orchestral in the complexity of the arrangements but this was just Neil and a guitar or the piano but his playing was of such a quality that you wouldn’t notice that the other thirty musicians were missing. I also liked that if you only owned a ‘Best of’ CD you wouldn’t have recognised most of the songs he played since the setlist was a pick n’ mix from all of his work over the past seventeen years. My only complaint was that after the support act Neil didn’t come on stage until 9.10. I think he’s failing to understand his demographic. Most of the audience were in their thirties and forties and don’t want a show that starts at 9.10 and ends at eleven. A timing that had you back at home in bed with a cocoa by ten would be much more suitable. When you’re five and go to a party it will have finished by 2pm, fifteen years later you’ll still be out at 2am but add another decade or two and at nine in the evening when you’re still yet to see the headline act you may turn to your spouse and say “Two songs and home?”.

Anyway, I was keen to sleep and the noise from next door was stressing me. I experienced something similar in a motel in Alabama once. When we had returned to the motel we noticed half a dozen charming looking men sitting outside of the room next to ours chatting and drinking beers. Add some neckerchiefs, a porch and several rocking chairs to the image if it helps. Their noise was tolerated for several hours before I decided to do something about it. Based purely on a stereotype and a fear of being nailed to a burning cross I didn’t wish to go and ask them to be quiet myself so I called reception. I heard their phone ring, some mumbling and then there was silence. And the silence remained throughout the night. I didn’t want to go and speak to the people in room 302 because venting spleen might become beating someone over the head with my empty coathanger given the stress levels I was experiencing at that point. So, just after nine I called reception. I was a little reticent in case I was asked “Are you the man who lost his trousers?”. One of the twelve year olds on reception said they’d call room 302. Then, when there’d been no change in the amount of shouting and banging, I called again at 9.40 and asked if they had called. They had. I told them there had been no change. They said they’d call again. When I called just after ten they said they would try again. I gave them five minutes and demanded a new room. My unravelling had come to an end. They told me Mr 302 had ceased to answer his phone. I was headed out to collect my room key when I found him just going back into the room. He was surprisingly young, perhaps only nineteen or twenty, very, very fat and very spotty. Maybe it was because he had a cream cake in each hand that he couldn’t close the door properly. “Don’t you know how to close your door properly?” I asked. Unfortunately what he thought I’d said was “I’m not very bright. Could you please teach me how to open and close this door?”. He was about to enlighten me. This misunderstanding tipped me over the edge and indeed there was much venting of spleen. You name your favourite expletive and I promise I used it. It was a torrent of abuse. He ceased to make eye contact and hung his head. I wasn’t discouraged. We have all been in arguments and afterwards thought of things we should have said but this was not what I experienced this time. My thinking was sharp and clear and linked directly to my mouth. There was no deviation, hesitation or repetition. I usually have all the authority of a seven year old girl but he was paying full attention. I’m sure you’d like to hear that I was then struck by a moment of self-awareness; a forty year old man verbally abusing a morbidly obese spotty youth and that I foresaw a point in the future when a therapist might be saying to him “Using the dolls show me what the man did to you” but I wasn’t. The problem with genuinely stupid people is not how many of them there are but that they don’t know how deeply stupid they are. It’s not that I think I’m perfect, it’s just that I’m the closest thing the planet has come up with thus far. This young man is now blessed with a full appraisal of his imbecility. He should have thanked me. I left him and went to collect the keycard to room 310 from the teenagers on reception.

Room 310 was the disabled access room. It had a door linking it to another room, possibly for carers. Either my hearing had become quite superhumanly good or there are serious soundproofing issues in that hotel. In the adjoining room were Vicky and Anna. I could hear pretty much every word of their conversation. Vicky’s boyfriend is called Richard. Her mother lives in Minehead. There is a very annoying woman called Monique who works in her office. Perhaps you know her. I didn’t want to complain about this too. Nobody wants to answer a knock at their hotel room door to find a naked, irate man in the corridor. I tried to relax and enjoy listening to them. Their conversation was like a bed time story and I drifted off to sleep to their accompaniment.

In the morning, reflected in each shop window I passed a flash of my socks waved to me from the gap between the bottom of my new trousers and my shoes.