Searching searching……………five days of my life spent searching for the car keys. Someone made an enquiry of someone who knew these things. Now that car keys are electronic and specifically programmed to the specific car you can get the official replacement for as little as £150 + VAT, tax, and any added charges, such as the paper for the bill and the tax on the paper for the bill, or you can get the unofficial version from a friend of a friend who knows a man who will do it for cash in hand, no questions asked £100, just don’t ever get stopped by the police.
So I was well motivated to keep looking.
Many years ago a miniaturist said to me that you should never clean the windows because burglars can look in and see what you’ve got and another told me you should never throw anything away because you would need it as soon as it hit the rubbish dump and rolled down the side and I wrote articles endorsing all these views and they were published in a magazine.
To thine own self be true. All this misery started because I began tidying up. In the previous squalor I’d have found the flipping keys instantly. They’d have been perched on whatever heap of junk I’d dropped them upon. Now I surveyed acres of carpet (there was a carpet under there! Who knew?) rolling to the distance like vacuumed carpet, bare of anything especially car keys.
I got right under the stairs and dragged out the lot. We have open plan stairs which nearly put me off buying this house. When I was a child the school uniform suppliers had open plan wooden stairs. Mounting them when tiny, in real fear of falling through the treads and being lost to history, on the way to being pushed and pulled around and forced into scratchy tweed clothing three sizes too big, was enough aversion therapy for anyone. So I hate open tread stairs. Cats, on the other hand love them. They are the closest thing you’re going to get to tree branches in the house.
They’re a great place to sit for keeping an eye on the humans.
They are also open, are open plan stairs, everything falls through them. Dust, fluff, tickets, coins and, potentially, car keys. Under them they amass one huge dolls house and several lacquered boxes full of dress patterns from the days when I was so poor I made my own clothes from left over bits when the market was shutting. I once went to dinner in the house of Lords wearing an outfit concocted of curtain lining and free peacock feathers picked up on a caravan site. These days under the stairs also collects many bags of gym equipment from the S&H and his father, one thin like string, the other not and both proof that you cannot get the perfect body simply by buying new trainers (five pairs. Five pairs! Am I married to a caterpillar or what?) and endless grimy grey vests.
So I dragged all of that out and endeavoured to vacuum but the vacuum was not playing ball. It didn’t suck as much as moan, which was fair enough because I felt like moaning too. I even got underneath and washed the skirting boards.
Well I would tell you the rest but we are heading off for the wild blue yonder to look after my demented mother, reluctantly. I spent much of yesterday morning doing her shopping but she still rang me this morning as I was fresh out of the shower, shivering in the strangely empty clean hall, to tell me I could not possibly know what she wanted. She then shouted a list at me, every item except three, exactly what I’d gone out and bought yesterday.
I think I’ve got carer’s fatigue. And a carpet downstairs too. I’ll continue with the cleaning and the story tomorrow. Much as I have done in real life.
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Jane Laverick.com – life abhors a vacuum but it doesn’t mind a little light dusting.