I’m quite surprised to be having a bad attack of Monday.
It’s not a thing I normally suffer from.
I just can’t be bothered.
It might be because there are so many things I ought to be doing.
But I’m not.
I think it might be because my days are so busy and crammed with stuff. There are several I ring. There’s the library at the end of the drive. There’s all the decorating and currently the garage. All of which are so pressing there’s no time to construct the lockdown house (I’ve been collecting the bits to do it, have you?) because really I need to make more cards, I’m going through my collection at speed.
I seem to have got this majorly wrong.
A lot of people on the news and various other places seem to be complaining of boredom.
Boredom? What’s that then?
Also terror. Sitting at home? Well I know the TV programming is slowly disintegrating…………….
Perhaps it’s just me, swimming upstream again.
My mother (how glad I am daily that she is not in a home, during this) used to say that I was different. She used to look at me thoughtfully and say, in tones of puzzlement, ‘You’re different,’ which was how you could tell, really. Frequently after she had done something appalling and I hadn’t reacted. I found some photographic slides of me and my cousin and parents from the fifties and very early sixties. You cannot tell about my mother from looking at her, I have quite a few slides of her, in a lime green hot pants suit, posed with a basket of flowers and a trowel, quite convincing if you don’t recall that the trowel was for the photo and a cup of tea and the newspaper, sitting down, was much more her style.
You cannot tell from looking at the outside of people what is inside their heads.
Except that now, locked in with themselves, the inside of people’s heads are beginning to leak out of their ears.
The OH, for example, has always looked wonderfully healthy, even propping up a bar he looked like an advert for it. Now his stomach is out where he can keep an eye on it.
Then there are all the folk who were always in the news being stunningly good looking. Take away the make-up artists and hairdressers and they look just like anyone, but with differently coloured roots.
As I have always cut my own hair I look much the same as always. I use that shampoo that lasts three washes, which still does. My skincare routine is that I wash it. I don’t go to a gym, I could never afford it, I have my gym behind the door (I bought a bit of equipment from shopping channels every time they did new year, new you. I still have the first one which is a pair of wheels on elastic that you roll out along the floor, still use it, still makes me squeak.)
It might be the garage getting me down.
You would never think the garage was the key to the house, would you?
I don’t mean the kind of garage that very rich people have, that have motor cars in them.
I mean the kind of garage that the vast mass in the middle have, i.e. you and me, that have everything in them that is not in the house. The useful stuff, you know, maybe a freezer, maybe outgrown children’s stuff (we had a sledge for years, until we gave it to the neighbours). I have, usually, two kilns, lots of porcelain slip, gardening tools, DIY tools, decorating stuff, pots and pots of plastic gardening pots, compost, plaster of Paris moulds and loads of ladders, cardboard and packaging and more tools.
It’s the stuff you cannot function without, which is not very decorative. I cannot imagine life without a kiln, or my favourite spade (which, incidentally I cannot find at present, I don’t suppose you know where it is?). I utterly need my bats (kiln shelves to you) and I value all my moulds so much.
But none of these things that keep my world turning are pretty, and currently all of them are all over the house under tarpaulins, while we finish decorating the garage.
Decorating the garage might seem like overkill, verging on rich people having mood lighting and motor cars in there. We had to do it because we had a new garage door. The new garage door would not shut unless the floor was level and no one knew the floor sloped until someone put a level on it, all over. As the OH remarked, ‘Let’s keep this floor nice’ and I agreed because the old floor was disintegrating. There were only so many spots you could stand a kiln on without it wandering off. (An undesirable trait in an electric kiln on at 1200 degrees). So we decided to paint the new floor, the OH got floor paint, but sadly not enough and now everywhere that sells floor paint is shut. So the OH has ordered more online and we have decided to get the first, watered down sealing coat, on today. We had to decorate one wall and the ceiling because they were plastered. The wall was plastered because it had to be lined with thermally insulating plaster board because the room above was like a fridge, and the ceiling the same, and to provide a place to mount the light.
We’ve done the walls and ceiling and are fed up with wading through all the junk, which should be in the garage, being out where you can see it and trip over it.
You see? It’s all the real stuff, normally tucked away out of sight, currently on display and very obvious.
There’s a metaphor there somewhere.
Anyway, God Speed the Plough, also the Floor Paint Distribution Centre, (working in a colleague responsible manner), naturally, and ditto in the post office.
Meanwhile I am off to do a work out, which always sorts me out and then I shall get on with the list.
The OH has appeared ready to paint, which is great, we will heft the wood store, cupboard and some step ladders out into the sunshine and he will paint the floor. Hooray. And when the new paint arrives (within 21 days. Three weeks to send paint? There is a queue for floor paint?) He’ll paint that, he says, and then we can arrange the garage and then………….
We’ll be able to get started on the dining room.
What idiot decided to have an entire house makeover, life makeover, major lifetime refurb just before a global pandemic?
Me, and there was you reading this because you thought it might contain words of value.
Roots, that’s what it is, and a carefully mascaraed ear (but not a sledge, you’ll have to go next door for that.)
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