Stuck Inside a Cloud

We don’t have a washing machine yet and haven’t had one since we moved back into the house on 19th December. You may be aware that there are several options available to you in this situation;


A Go to the laundrette

B Visit friends and ask if you can use their washing machine.

C Pop your laundry into a large jiffy bag and post it to your mother.

D Febreeze

E Extend the amount of time you wear your clothes for (a lot).

F Keep buying more clothes.


I won’t tell you which option has been the favourite in this house but we’ve been using an increasingly fluid definition of ‘fresh and clean’. There has even been some sniffing before deciding if one can risk to wear this item of clothing for yet another day and even asking each other to sniff, asking “Is this clean?”. I always have to put a statement at the end of my reports outlining my professional responsibilities to the court. I feel I should now add “This report was written whilst wearing a shirt originally placed in the laundry basket on 16th January, removed on February 2nd and worn again, returned to the laundry and worn again today. I apologise”. Since I largely work from home the dress code has always been fairly relaxed but has now become a health hazard to others.


An issue that had been holding up progress on the house was that we couldn’t find anyone to polish the kitchen’s concrete floor. Three different companies came over and polished a small patch and give a quote. The patches all looked slightly different and one company wanted to charge ten times what another did. The problem was the one of the patches was George Michael and the other was distinctly Andrew Ridgeley (topical reference) so it was an easy decision to make and then Marianna just had to negotiate until they’d relinquished all of their profit. They began on February 28th, thinking it would take four days. However, by the third day it was clear that for some reason they couldn’t achieve the finish on the whole floor that they had some weeks earlier on the patch. A supervisor, manager and then company owner visited and agreed the finish wasn’t good enough and on the fourth day they stripped off the work they’d done and began again. It took them eight days to complete. It looks great but came at the additional cost of damage to the kitchen radiators, damage to the kitchen door when they took it off its hinges and damage to the wall they rested it against.

On the 3rd and 4th of March the carpets were fitted on the first and second floors and stairs. To select the colour Marianna and I went through a process longer than the X Factor auditions which involved many, many samples spread over the floors. It appeared that our carpet fitters were unable to stand upright without leaning on the walls. This is fine but they seemed to have washed their hands with soot before arriving so our white walls were covered with handprints. Also, as the carpets were carried up the stairs they had marked the walls. All of the walls it seemed. Greg, the painter, had advised that some of his lads should come and do touch ups before the carpets were fitted and they did but just forty eight hours later the walls and skirting boards were even more marked than they had been. As overjoyed as I was with how good the carpet looked I found the damage to the walls deflating. The mantra in my head is ‘What a waste of time, money and effort’ and it’s hard to silence. Still, once the carpets were fitted we could live in the whole house. Well, not really because all of our belongings were piled in the dining room and the furniture they might normally be stored in was still in storage.

With the carpets down we could move two bed bases we bought on Ebay some weeks before up to the bedrooms. These were a real bargain. I’d been working away and set an alarm for half past midnight to get up and bid on one of them. No one else was bidding at that time of day so I won it for 99p. When the seller sent me a message about payment he said he’d been selling another but no one had bid on it so I could have that too at no extra charge. I found a courier who collected and delivered them for £30 so for on only £30.99 I had two bed bases worth well over £200. Once the carpets were down we attempted to move them up stairs. But, of course, they wouldn’t fit. After an hour when my mood had gone form a normal one to anger and then to misery we had discovered that, by a few millimetres, they were just too big. We may ask Max if he’ll remove a bedroom window when the scaffolding goes up for the front of the house to be rendered in a month or so. Or sell them on Ebay. Or give them to a local charity.

Sophie, Tim and Jennie too

Around five o’clock yesterday I drove into Warwick to give blood. On the way home I had just stopped at traffic lights about a mile from home when a dark blue Vauxhall forced itself into the back of my car whilst travelling at around fifteen or twenty miles an hour. I saw it approach in the rear view mirror and partly thought “Shit!” and partly “Yep, that’s about right. It’s been nearly an hour since something went wrong”. The Vauxhall forced me into the back of the car in front of me and that car into the one in front of it. As I got out the driver of the Vauxhall was repeatedly apologising and saying that she had pressed the brakes but nothing had happened. I wanted to say “Something did happen. You ruined my car” but went for something along the lines of “Well, we’re both ok and that’s the main thing”. There was a fair amount of damage to the rear of my car but the front had been completely transformed, moving the metal inwards and upwards and the glass down onto the tarmac. I spoke to the man I hit (Tim) and the girl he hit (Sophie) and they were both okay but could instantly feel the soreness of the impact in the neck and shoulders as I could. Jennie, who had hit me, first called her husband and then the police. We moved her car and then mine to the side of the road slightly and then began exchanging details. I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy taking charge of the situation. I called Marianna to tell her I’d be a little late. I think I could hear her googling 'injurylawyers4u' while we spoke. “What sort of shape is the car in?”. “Well, it’s not the shape of a car anymore”. Jennie’s husband arrived before the police. He was brought by someone else. He walked towards his wife but didn’t speak to her. Instead he inspected the damage to her car and then without addressing me inspected my car and then Tim’s and Sophie’s. He then spent several minutes talking to his mate who’d brought him before going to speak to his wife as the police arrived. He was thoroughly charmless. If Jennie woke up with any injuries this morning they would probably have been inflicted by him after they got home. I hadn’t realised so little happened in Leamington and Warwick but our little incident warranted two police cars and four officers and an entire fire engine crew. An officer advised Tim and Sophie that, since there was minimal damage to their cars, they could leave. When told where I lived he said that if mine would start and the wheels would turn I could drive it home. And so I did. After a few hundred yards the exhaust began bouncing off the tarmac.


It was a very lengthy process speaking to the insurers that evening. They wanted a description of Sophie, Tim and Jennie in case I had been a victim of some sort of scam. For some reason I could give a fully comprehensive description of young, slim, blonde attractive Sophie even down to some piercings and tattoos she had. Tim was ginger and wearing the uniform of his work place so that was easy but Jennie had made no impact on my memory at all.

“Err, a woman”.

“We do require a full description of all of the people involved, sir”

“A woman, probably in her early fifties, at least ten stone over weight, particularly sallow skin probably as a result of several decades of smoking and consuming a high fat diet, wearing the outfit of a Doncaster barmaid circa 1978 presenting herself at some speed into the back of my car”.

“Thank you”.


I feel that the four of us are now bound together forever. Tim will probably call me up any minute and suggest the four of us go out for a pint. Or he may want us all to go on a caravanning holiday. I might suggest we don’t tell Jennie.

The Bearding Version

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.


http://beardedgentleman.com/blog/buy-online/

Ghosts

It is Christmas. Almost. Here are three things I want to share with you.


1) Marianna has two very dear friends called Mike and Margaret. She’s only known the two of them for just over two years but the three of them couldn’t be closer. Even if you’ve known Mike and Margaret or Marianna for decades when you’re in the company of the three of them you’ll feel like a spare part. The love they have for each other is clear. It seems that even though ‘M and M’, as Mariana calls them, had three children and successful careers and lives what had always been missing from their lives was a small Greek woman. I think they now consider themselves to have four daughters. Marianna hasn’t seen them since the four of us met up as a surprise for her on her birthday in September. Mike called yesterday to briefly tell Marianna that Margaret has been in hospital for the past three weeks. Although a diagnosis hasn’t been confirmed it seems highly likely that she has pancreatic cancer. The prognosis isn’t good.

2) We don’t have a kitchen and so, because it’s Christmas tomorrow, we thought we’d treat ourselves to some extra special uncooked pre-prepared food and so made our first visit to the Waitrose store in Kenilworth. Whilst wandering around the aisles I spotted a face I was sure I recognised. Before my brain seemed to have registered that this was a former patient from my NHS days in Lincolnshire I said “Will?”. He turned and looked towards me but then carried on. I tried it a bit louder; “Will Simpson?”. He turned and then took a step towards me.

I’m sure you know what I do for a living. I’m sure you know that I fell out of love with it a long while ago. I would summarise the job as involving myself in the worst that human life has to offer. I have, sadly and worryingly, become quite immune to it. The client says “And two days later I returned to the forest, dug her up and had sex with her again” and I just nod, make a note and ask the next question. I should stress that Will was a mental health rather than a forensic client. He hadn’t killed, raped or robbed anyone. Perhaps it was because I was only about three years into my career when I met him or that we’re the same age or just that he was a little, lost boy in a man’s body looking to me to help him that he touched me. This is despite his stating in our first session that “99% of people are arseholes and I’m not sure about the other 1%. You’re probably one of the arseholes”. He ranted about how awful his childhood had been in our first few sessions and the physical and psychological torture he had received from his mother, then we did some constructive therapeutic work for many months and intermittently I tried to convince him that life was worth continuing with. He was rarely convinced. When my career took me away from the NHS our time together came to an end.

When he came towards me I reached my hand out to shake his and was close to tears. I could say that this was because of the injury I sustained to my back an hour so earlier, that it was because it was Christmas or because of the extortionate price Waitrose charge for the average item but I was tearful because I was so genuinely pleased to see him and to see him alive and looking well. “It’s Patrick Bodger. Do you remember me?”. I didn’t want to say “I was your psychologist” because he was with someone. He said “Of course, I remember you. You turned out to be one of the most important people in my life”. It’s not much of a career and I increasingly see myself as a hack but I’ll remember his words for a long time.

3) This evening, just a little while ago, I called my friend Paul. We haven’t spoken since Christmas Eve 2008 when Marianna and I happened upon him in Tesco in Wisbech. We’d been estranged for a couple of years at that time. Typically, Paul began the conversation as if we’d last spoken a few days previously;

“Hello Paul, it’s Patrick”

“Hello, mate, you must be hoping Kenny Dalglish will come and sort out the mess Roy Hodgson is making of your season”

I met him just after I’d turned twenty one. Even though he was, and still is, twenty years older than me we became firm friends based on shared interests and activities; music, playing our guitars with each other and in front of a number of others, supporting different football teams and silently watching matches, going to gigs, silently watching movies. When I asked him to be my best man at my wedding he told me that he’d done it twice before and both of those couples were now divorced. That made me laugh. It doesn’t seem so funny now. It was, unfortunately, the women in our lives and the tendency for all four of us to do things together that eventually meant that Paul and I saw less and less of each other. Something about the four of us and the things we did together didn’t work and the friendship died away instead of us realising that we could have just reverted back to watching football together or spending hours trying to figure out the chords to a tune by The Eagles and let our significant others do other things.

It may not be clear why I want to share these three things with you but I want to add this;

“Life is very short. People come and go from our lives so quickly. You must never miss an opportunity to let them know how much they mean to you”. (Dr Frasier W. Crane, 1993)

Around The House in 189 days

189 days after building work began we have moved back into the house. We don’t have a kitchen, the furniture is still in storage, half of the rooms aren’t yet completely finished but it feels so good to be back in our own home.

The Cuttings

Have you ever been to Macklin Street in Derby? If you have you will surely be aware of ‘Christopher’s Men’s Hairdressing and Model Railway Book Shop’. That’s right, a shop where you can do two things. They are



1.     (If you’re a man) Get your hair ‘dressed’.

2.     Buy a book about Model Railways.

There is no doubt about what happens in this shop. It’s not like CURRY’S. Have you ever seen a Chicken Korma on their shelves? It is also noteworthy that this is not a barbershop. No one goes into ‘CMHAMRBS’ for a short back and sides or ‘the usual’. This is the dressing of hair. For men. Crimping, coiffuring, lacquering and perming are sure to be taking place on a daily basis. The Derby area must be full of men with hair like Pat Sharpe (circa 1988), Kevin Keegan (circa 1975) and Donald Trump (circa always).


I wonder if they’re widely advertised in Derbyshire; “POPPING INTO TOWN FOR A COUPLE OF THINGS? IF THOSE THINGS ARE A HAIRCUT AND A BOOK ON THE 1978 HORNBY INTER-CITY SLEEPER WHY NOT COME TO.......”.

Or even

“SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND, SIR? HOW ABOUT THIS BOOK ON THE FLYING SCOTSMAN?”

The owner, Christopher, is clearly a lucky man and has been able to make a living by combining something he is skilled at (hairdressing) with something he has a passion for (Books about Model Railways). It’s usually only the rich and famous who are able to do this. David Beckham is fortunately skilled at playing football and this enables him to pursue his real passion which is for covering himself in tattoos. Cheryl Cole is skilled at selling shampoo and has a passion for assaulting people in nightclub toilets. I’d love to describe the interior of ‘CMHAMRBS’ to you but I didn’t go in or even peer through the window. It had already taken me thirty minutes to find Macklin Street and discover that it was actually 500 yards from where I’d seen my client that afternoon. I walked away from ‘CMHAMRBS’ and booked myself into the Heritage Hotel. It was one of the most depressing places I’ve ever stayed in plus, it transpired, there was a nightclub within the building. The Heritage was able to provide something they were skilled at (Auschwitz style hospitality) with something they had a passion for (depriving me of sleep until 3am).

Above Us Only SKY

Monday the 6th was a big day in the history of the renovation project because it was the day on which the kitchen floor was to be laid. It is a polished concrete floor. It is made by laying concrete and polishing it. A lot. The team responsible for the floor were due between 7.30 and 8.00 but were already there when we arrived at 7.20. While they unloaded equipment from their vans we tried to remove the chipboard panel that currently covers the hole where our garage door should be. We didn’t want them carrying things through our lovely new front door and over our lovely new floorboards to get into the kitchen. The problem was that it was minus nine and the screws in the panel had been put in with an automated screwdriver. I was far from warm and far from amused. The panel was eventually removed and we left the men to it.





I returned to the house at four in the afternoon, assuming they would have finished, replaced the panel, pulled the front door closed and gone home. Of course they hadn’t finished. When I wandered in through the garage one of the men was holding on to the back of the trouser belt of another so he could lean forward and extend the long handled tool he was using to smooth the concrete all the way to the opposing wall. What would normally be an eight hour job might, they thought, take them until nine or ten in the evening because of the difficulties the sub-zero temperature was causing with the process. They said I should tell the neighbours that they were about to start using equipment that would “sound like a Harley Davison gang revving their engines”. I knocked at Brian and Julie’s door but got no answer even though Julie’s car was in the drive. It’s highly likely she saw me walk in the driveway and hid. Before heading back to Vicky’s I sent a text to Brian; “Hi. Just called at your place but got no reply. Our kitchen floor is being laid today. The workmen are about to use machinery that may just be audible to you. Sorry for any inconvenience. Patrick”. You may recall that over recent months Brian and Julie have chosen to completely blank us. I imagined Brian at work, sitting at his desk, with lots of pens and pencils in neat rows, in an office the size of a cupboard fighting back tears as he read my message and felt the love, admiration and respect contained within it. He was so overwhelmed by emotion that he couldn’t find words that would convey what he felt so he just texted “OK”.

Marianna and I returned to the house in the evening to clean and tidy in preparation for moving our things, and eventually ourselves, back in. The men were still there revving their Harley’s. We left them at 9.30. They thought they’d be finished at midnight. At 7 the next morning we had a call from Greg, leader of the painting team, wanting to get into the house. However, when we got there the painters were already in the house. The men working on the floor had only finished at 5.45am and their supervisor had been over to inspect the work and so was able to let the painters in. The floor looked really good. Which is what you’d expect for twenty two and half hours work.




I hadn’t met Greg before. He told me that electricians and plumbers were sloppy but his team, as finishers of projects, were different. Marianna told them several times not to walk on the kitchen floor because a couple of days were needed for the finish to dry. I told her it was unnecessary to keep telling them, not with the added reminder of the pieces of wood we’d crisscrossed across the doorway. Marianna headed off to work and I went to an assessment in Birmingham. Of course when Marianna called at the house later there were footprints across the kitchen floor. We hope they’ll fade.




On Wednesday we had an early meeting with Max who was noting all of the final little jobs that need doing. He was concerned about someone breaking in and stripping out all of the radiators, showers etc. Albanians do it a lot apparently. Pete had said he’d be there on Tuesday but called Marianna and now wasn’t sure he’d be over that week at all because he’d had so many emergency call outs. Max called him. I’m not sure what he said but both Pete and John appeared thirty minutes later.




The good news of the week was that I finally received payment for a court appearance I made seven months ago. There had been some dispute over how much they would pay me and, rather than get nothing, I settled for an amount that was about 60% of what I’d normally be paid. In error they sent me the full amount.




The bad news, and I’d struggle to explain why it has distressed me so much, is that the cabling hidden behind our paint and plaster means that, unless we want holes drilled and visible cables, we can only have broadband and telephone supplied by SKY. I have little firsthand knowledge of the company but I put them in the same category as the BNP, Adolf Hitler, Sharon Osbourne and McDonalds; that there’s just something intrinsically evil about them.