There are Young Men in my house

 

They are on tour with the Lion King - a cause for huge excitement around here.   

Offstage man is slight and seemingly quiet, he nibbles on the edge of a pizza or takes little bit of ham sometimes, he has set up a keyboard in his room and before they set off for the theatre he belts out a show tune to set the mood

Onstage man eats like a carnivorous horse, cooking up huge quantities of chicken at midnight to power him through the next 24 hours, he tells me he undergoes 20 costume changes at each performance of which there are 9 per week.

Last week I was given a ticket so I could see where all that chicken gets spent

The performers come on and off stage at a dizzying rate wearing costumes that range from spray-on-almost-nothing to magnificent puppet-costumes with people balancing inside a towering construction on uneven stilts or bouncing around in lumpy body bags with spring-loaded heads. Sometimes a person will stroll across stage pushing a little animal-trolley like they're delivering in-flight drinks 

The finale consists of a triumphant parade, colourful paper birds swoop overhead as the animals assemble singing heartily, making it all look fun and easy. I can see my boy half-bent over inside a giraffe, his face framed by a circular hole in the animal's neck, the grin on his face looks like his life depends on it.

reasons to be cheerful

One ... the colours of my thread garlands

Two ... it didn't rain until noon

Three ... at 11am I was swimming in the lake by the ocean

At 9am I went to change bed linen in the boys rooms, the young one uses the same unwashed plate for every meal, this doesn't bother me, but on my weekly visit to his room I can't help but pick up his old ketchuppy plate and take it down to the dishwasher thus forcing him to use a clean plate - just once a week.

In the older boys room there are sticky squash glasses. Toenail cuttings are lined up by the giant tv screen. I'm still not screaming. Then I discover something so screamy that I can't ever tell another living soul, I have to find someone with a melon-baller who can open up my skull and scrape out the place with that memory, meanwhile I've squashed it into the tiniest place possible and left the room.

... at 10am I got in the car and drove to the lake

bucket loads of rain

have soaked us beyond saturation

we are so wet we are virtually transparent 

It seems important for my mental health that I list reasons to be cheerful:

1. This weekend I made two divine apricot/almond/cherry, tarts, also an onion, fennel and olive tart and an asparagus and cheese tart - these were shared with several lovely friends and relatives

2. A big bag of old wooden cotton reels in a charity shop, all colours of proper old silk, plus several special tiny reels of buttonhole-twist and fat reels of linen thread - the whole lot became mine for a fiver. I have strung them into garlands and hung them in the window. They are beautiful

3. I spent this morning helping my octogenarian neighbour make a cascading silver cape, she will wear it to perform in the street with her friends

two boy guests remain in my home

the young one wears an all-black outfit and burns a pair of faux fillet de poulet au pain in a pan each evening. If I prepare vegetables while he's in the kitchen I watch him shrink with fear - tonight I will try him with a bible or some jesus-related jewellery to test my vampire theory.

A heavy box was delivered for the older boy, while we were all away. By the time he found and unpacked it, it had been by the back gate for a few days. Undaunted he filled all available fridge space with large plastic boxes of colourful rice-and-chicken-in-sauce meals, he said
I'm sure it's fine, it's still cold 

We looked at the labels which said  'use before June 2020' and I raised all my eyebrows

he read the instructions  - 'reheat from frozen'

the next hour was spent emptying all the smelly yellow-and-red meals into the food waste bin and filling  recycling boxes with plastic containers.

He has returned to KFC.


more reasons to be cheerful:

1. Last night I met up with friends that I love and don't see enough of

2. there's a slice of apricot tart on the kitchen table and I have cream in the fridge

3. the boys will leave next week

Did parenting stop being a thing?

I am hosting two young men (one is nearly 30) neither has been taught basic life skills:

the younger one used the washing machine yesterday, I showed him the first time but forgot to demonstrate the exact amount of laundry liquid to be used for one machine load - he used one whole litre

the older one is tiring of KFC, he did use the kitchen once, placing a raw chicken in the oven - but then unsure what else was supposed to happen, he has now subscribed to a scheme that sends him meals by post

It's hammock-crazy around here

Community hammock at the bottom of our road. 

Hammock-for-human-beans at the bottom of our garden.  

My household currently contains two adolescent boys*, one is in his teens and the other is nearly 30, each of them consumes enough cans of pop to fill a bathtub daily.  Neither of these boys owns a coat and I am reminded of the Finnish boy who stayed a few years ago

In other news

I have embarked on 'The Great Floor Polishing' this involves much shifting of furniture and then sweeping, scrubbing and scraping before the oily polish can be laid down in thin thin coats. After the oiling, people must skate around on tea towels so it polishes up nice and shiny. Last time I did this I had spilt tea on my computer and lost the use of the letter 'i'

*the boy-in-a-hammock is not one of the resident pop-drinking boys, he is a visiting-boy

lunch with eleven women

in a sun-drenched-wisteria-ridden garden,  a laburnum tree burgeoning with yellow flowers took up most of the air above us, tiny bits of cobalt sky peeped through the blooms. We ate salmon in dill sauce with Jersey Royal potatoes then summer pudding with cream and raspberry cream roulade with extra cream. We were celebrating a scratch-card win.

Our host is an undertaker, four of the guests were either undertakers or 'in the business'. The host didn't want the lunch to become 'too-death-ey' and kept trying to introduce other topics of conversation but death and it's complications are too much fun; one guest had been asked to bury a large man in a wardrobe - there was a problem getting the body into the chapel, another guest was in the process of converting an ex-Carphone Warehouse into a mortuary ...

in other news

French Boy lodger has found his culinary groove - breakfast is fizzy pop and chocolate biscuits. For supper he has found a never-ending supply of reconstituted chicken-in-breadcrumbs, he fries as many nuggets as will fit on a big plate every single evening, I'm hoping he gets home to his mother before scurvy sets in.

We headed out to a Greek Island

it was out-of-season-closed-down so no-one else was there, the spring flowers ran riot in abundance and the weather was out-of-season mad, wild winds, then calm, mostly sun but some blustery black skies and a bit stormy sometimes.

We stayed in a white white cottage on the edge of a tiny bay where a grumpy old shepherd brought his flock of maggotty old sheep to nibble at the grass edges, the sheep liked to go in the water which made the shepherd furious, if I went down to the sea when the sheep were trying to swim to freedom they would come out of the water to see if they could come home with me - which made the shepherd doubly furious.

The local tavern had no inside, a bit of clear polythene was wrapped around one of the sides of the open air terrace - giving pale shelter from raging winds, we double-wrapped up for our daily fried-cheese-and-chips-with-Greek-beer visits.

The sea cottage was owned by someone in Athens who sent daily messages to remind me what is forbidden:

DON"T USE THE BBQ!!!

DON'T TURN ON LIGHTS AND HEAT AT SAME TIME!

DON'T DRINK WATER!

DON'T FEED ANIMALS!

DON'T LEAVE DOORS OPEN, ANIMALS WANT TO COME IN!


Around the house, drawings of massive mice with big crosses over them are pinned to the doors

A few scraggy cats came by but most had read the notices and didn't stay except for the gray-and-white one who took up residence on the outside mat.

We got home at the end of last week and now a very young French Boy is living with us, FB wears glasses, from the front he is brainy-looking, when he turns around we see the design carved into his almost-shaved hair, this might be the 21st century equivalent of a mullet.*

*business out front, party round the back!

overheard conversation

I came across this in one of my old notebooks

Three women are sitting at a table under a tree outside a café, they have tea and cakes, one of the women is asked about her new boyfriend   

So what’s this man like?

He’s the hairiest man I’ve ever seen - hairier than a monkey

hairier than Robbie Williams?

I’ve never seen Robbie Williams

He’s really hairy

Yeah hairier than that – when he was in hospital the nurse drew back his sheets and screamed

joining in with student socialising

I was invited for chilli  along with some other classmates by a fellow student who put it out over the facebook

any time after 3pm   

I arrived at 4.30 by which time the inviter was a little stoned, no-one else had arrived yet

we shared a bowl of chilli in the living room - the sofa was made up as a bed and there was also a bed in the room (London student houses look for maximum occupation)


a housemate was having noisy sex above our heads

The new boy from Iceland

looks as though he has stepped out from that painting.

He is raw and green as a newly hatched cabbage. Nothing makes any sense to him; not how to make a padlock work on a gate, or what things constitute food. His luggage was a toothbrush and a bike, he doesn't own a coat and he has had to go and buy himself some stouter shoes -  I have a bet on how long the bike will last (less than one week) because he secures it with a rubber band and forgets to bring it in behind that gate he must learn to lock and unlock.

I don't know how much of this is about the difference between our countries and how much is about him being twenty years old but I daily resist the urge to put him into a brown paper bag with a banana to ripen a bit more.

Visiting the Young Ones

The man with the cool black dog and his teenage son live in a medium-size house in Brighton. The man is half Labrador half teenager and the three of them live together in a house ripe with the smell of dog, adolescent boy, fried things, unwashed bedlinen and the poo that lies in wait in the lavatory. Cables trail along hallways  and down the stairs converging in the centre of the living room. Walls are hung with guitars and bikes and the supermarket shop stays in it's bags on the table until the ice cream leak becomes conspicuous.

They are very happy in their boy fug letting me stay in the spare room with it’s duvet made of soggy cardboard and yellowed pillow with permanent head dent.

We scrunched together on the sofa watching scifi and adventure films interfering with the plot and who had been in which films before and eating pizza and then meringue and cream mixed with a little bit of fruit so we could say – YES THERE WERE VEGETABLES