It’s been a really tough couple of months. I always feel the need to acknowledge that my life or home hasn’t been lost in a New Zealand earthquake and I’m not in an African village deciding which of my children might eat today but still I feel it’s been a tough couple of months. I’ve spent most of it working and trying to get up to date. A few, really very minor, events conspired to make me behind with my workload. These were;
A computer virus in the middle of December.
Suffering a muscle spasm in my back on the 24th of December and again on the 30th and being unable to work for a couple of days and then working really slowly while I returned to full fitness.
Clients failing to attend appointments because of the snow
Not having internet access at home for the first five weeks after we moved back into the house.
These small things meant that I began the year failing to meet deadlines and I’m still not up to date. It’s been like bailing out a sinking ship with a colander. I began getting up at 5am and then 4 and then 3 and still didn’t seem to gain any ground. When the amount of hours I worked each week went into triple figures it didn’t really register. I slept for seven and three quarter hours on 27th January but that’s the only day when I’ve had more than five hours since the year began. At the end of January I took what I view to be very major step and contacted over a dozen solicitors to ask if my deadlines could be extended. Very few of them agreed to this.
I’m working on the laptop on the second floor using a wallpaper pasting table for a desk but otherwise we are pretty much just living in one room and just using one bathroom. The house wasn’t really ready for us when we moved in and very little has changed. The plasterers came in December to plaster the garage ceiling. Our office filing cabinet was in the garage and they moved it onto the driveway a couple of feet from the garage while they plastered. A scrap metal person/gypo stole it while they worked. It only contained teabags rather than confidential files but I’ve just felt that we’re on a run of bad luck. The painters visited briefly the week after we moved in and Pete made a brief visit in January (but we’re still lacking one radiator and the shower only does very cold and scolding hot) but everyone is waiting for the kitchen which of course we still don’t have. It was due to be fitted on the 10th of January but because we hadn’t found anyone who would polish the concrete floor that had to be cancelled. The suppliers weren’t amused and it was rearranged for March 14th. We have been eating pre-prepared foods in various forms from the local Tesco since we moved in although Marianna borrowed a camping stove a few weeks ago so we’ve moved on to soups and baked beans. I think I’ve regained all the weight I worked so hard to lose in the latter third of last year. It may seem obvious but you’d be surprised how quickly fresh produce goes off when you don’t have any way of chilling it. If you want to make your own cheese just keep a pint of milk at room temperature for a day. So, we eat from Tupperware and do the washing up in a bucket in the bath. We’ve spent an absolute fortune and are back to living how we were a year ago.
On the 24th January we had a phone line fitted, only five weeks after asking SKY to do so. There was, of course, a fault with it in that the phone didn’t ring (it wasn’t the phone’s at fault). If you were going to call you’d need to text me in advance. Also, you couldn’t use the internet and the phone at the same time. It must be like this in third world countries or Leeds. The engineer who laid all of the original cables returned and lifted a large number of floorboards before the fault was found. No one seems to get anything right the first time.
We don’t have curtains or blinds or anything covering any of our windows. Initially, if there was any sort of nudity, we would stoop or crawl about in front of the windows but we’re less bothered now. I’ve begun to think that primitive man only walked upright after inventing curtains. We are using the shower in the front bathroom since it’s the only one that really works and so a pixelated view of me naked is available to my neighbours every morning around 8am.
From early January the house has had an unpleasant smell of drains. Well, not the house, the bathrooms. Curiously, this smell fills the room if a toilet is flushed, tap is used or if it rains. Obviously every time it fills my nostrils I wonder why we’ve worked so hard, spent so much and yet we’re living in one room of a house that smells of sewerage. Also, when it was raining particularly heavily some weeks ago water was belching out of the plughole in the bath in the front bathroom. We told Pete about all of this and he said it was the drains and thus Max’s responsibility and when we told Max he said there was nothing wrong with the drains and it must be down to Pete and so nothing was done. When, during heavy rain last week, an inch of water had come out of the plughole to fill the bath Marianna called Max and he came and unblocked the drains and the water and the smell disappeared.
I am currently fully bearded. For the first month or so we didn’t have any shaving points and since then I’ve been a little indifferent to personal grooming. I’m indulging in something of a fat Elvis period. You shouldn’t be imagining anything neatly trimmed like George Michael’s designer stubble this is more like Rasputin, ZZ Top, a homeless person or the bearding version of Amy Winehouse’s hair.
Oh, today the polishing of the kitchen floor began.
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