Close inspection of my windows

has revealed more rot than was suspected. A man with a Black Country accent, gold teeth a headscarf and dreadlocks came and took the worst one off to the window workshop leaving a sad boarded-over hole behind, this has coincided with news that the car needs a new radiator AND air conditioning system. 

I must try to  interweave Happy Thoughts among the grim reality of my latest news:
HT 1. I went to see a movie  - 'The Square' at a cinema called The Cube - loved the movie but managed to kick over a full glass of rum as I took my seat

Cheesey* has moved back into our neighbourhood, he appears outside my gate to alternate abusive language with wheedling tones - you and I could get on really well if you'd just give it a chance. On Sunday I was inside the house and heard him swearing at someone in the next road, his choice of words indicated that he was harrassing another woman, I walked out to see him pushing his trolley up the road, he'd tipped over the big rubbish bin in the entrance to her block of flats, she was on the phone to the police saying that this had been going on for weeks.

HT 2. I found some fine-wool-brand-new-never-worn Jaeger trousers at the charity shop - perfect fit perfect length

*clicking on the 'Cheesey' label below will throw up yet more Cheese

I returned to Bristol Saturday afternoon

and am just starting to dry out at the edges. The first Devon day was drizzly, the second was showery, the third really rather rainy, the fourth, fifth and sixth days poured buckets unendingly. Saturday morning was dry but overcast so I took Old Dog for a trip to Sidmouth - a 1950's seaside town slotted in a valley between eye-bogglingly red cliffs.

On Easter Sunday one of the lodgers locked herself in her room with a medical emergency - something to do with recreational drugs and a bit scary but we've recovered now.

This morning the scaffolders arrived to metal-up the front of our house. The very chatty decorator arrives tomorrow. This afternoon I suddenly hated the test colour patches that I'd painted on the front wall and went rushing around the neighbourhood with a paint swatch book, holding the coloured squares against houses that I think look nice. At the moment I think we're going with 'Frosted Sage'.

This is my 1005th post, I always just miss significant anniversaries so I'll just say now that in three months I'll have been Sandwiching for TEN YEARS

I wore emerald silk

to attend the festival

looking around the market area there was a table piled with old costume jewellery which I picked through and found some earrings to go with my favourite daisy necklace (which I was wearing as you can see from this picture taken near the best food stand)

The jewellery seller sidled up, looked at me and then at the earrings I'd chosen and said approvingly  

Ah yes, I can see that you're a fan of early plastic

Other things

I've been told that it's difficult to follow or comment here unless you sign up to the all-seeing-eye that is Google. If you are not a spammer or purveyor of porn or dodgy inheritances and feel inclined to send me a cyber wave feel free to do so via lululabonne(at)gmail.com - my profile page connects to this address too.

I was in Wales

and seeing a tiny charity shop, I went inside, it was crammed full of the sort of items that might be left after a garage sale had finished, all piled in that way that the removal of one thing will bring an avalanche of plastic beakers, blankets and jigsaw boxes down on the large woman on the sofa in the middle of the jumble who was staring at me

then a cross woman came in

My daughter's just bin yer, she bought these curtains off you and she wishes she never 'ad - she wanted plain and these are patterned and they don't suit 'er room at all - will you change 'em?

sofa lady indicated the other two curtains available - a single stained shiny boudoir curtain and a torn stewed-gooseberry throw. Curtain lady and I dos y doed in order that she could get into position, inspect them properly and decide which would look better in her daughter's room.

First thing this week

I was in London visiting a woman who wanted someone to take care of her house while she went away - we got on like a house on fire - it seemed that we had an arrangement ...

... but then her girlfriend turned up and did not like the look of our house on fire at all, no ma'am. Cigar clamped between her teeth she made sure that I would not like to be in this house one moment longer.


Second thing this week I found myself painting two bathrooms for money, one is the colour of dulchey de lechey and the other is mermaid-tail-shiny-green

Found some metres of this

in a charity shop - I think it's the dogs

and now I know how to finish decorating the bedroom - it involves a GOLD ceiling

it's going to be F.A.B

When I started working

at the Brain Surgery the main things I didn't like there, were the colour (pork pie meat) and the smell in the waiting room (charity shop underwear).

Which is why I offered to decorate it last month. Also, the doorbell worked only intermittently causing patients to call to me through the letterbox to get let in.

After the decorating the doorbell didn't work at all but the smell had miraculously disappeared.

Today the Brain Doctor noticed that a thing that used to be plugged into the wall at skirting board level had disappeared - This apparently, was the doorbell buzzer (!!!)

I'd taken it for a stale room freshener and thrown it out. I've promised to buy a new one before Monday.

The elderly couple

live in a house entirely painted and furnished with the colours of stewed fruit - it feels and smells exactly like my grandmother's house did in the '60s.

For two weeks the decorators have been busy on the top floor - today was the big reveal, it has been repainted exactly the same colours. I find this comforting.

Accumulations

turquoise is loneliness - wendy walgate

The days have been doubled up busy - painting and clearing out the Brain Surgery, tidying the community garden and making-lists for the annual cooking-with-music event.

Nooks and hidey-holes in the Brain Surgery are stuffed with accumulations. I sort and make collections of things that go together and make homes for them. The sorting and collecting and homing has infected me.

I dreamt about a vast bed in a dark wooden room, a high four-poster stacked with many layers of mattresses and pillows, filed in between them are dozens of sleeping labrador puppies, black ones and yellow ones. I patrol the bed pulling out a floppy hibernating puppy here and there, checking it's breathing before slipping it back in place and continuing my rounds. Also, in the interstices of the bed frame are tiny wooden tubes, each containing a bee which need regular, gentle watering.

Then Lennie Kravitz came into the room - I didn't want him to know about the puppies

The Brain Doctor is away next week

he suggested that, in lieu of having aimless conversations with his patients maybe I could freshen up the waiting room.

I'm rubbish at cleaning so I plan to paint over the dirt.

I  mixed up two nice colours, painted them  onto a piece of cardboard and went down to the paintshop and asked if they would match them into a quantity of paint. The guy in the shop said.

It's always best to buy sample pots first then you can see if you like them

I like these colours - a big tin of each please

Ok and then if you don't like it you only have to wait a couple of years - get your money's worth out if it - and then you can paint it over



 

Woke Underneath a Thunderbird Duvet

in my friend's spare room. The wall ahead of me was papered with a remarkable trompe l'oeil wooden fence. I came down for breakfast and asked my friend where he'd found such treasure.


It was in this shop in Sussex, sold mainly furniture and carved things but upstairs ... do you remember that bloke who did all those Yes album covers in the seventies

Roger Dean

Yeah him ... he was up there selling prints of that shit art he does ... you know what he charges for a digital print of that stuff TWO GRAND that's how much and he's a right git too, he's got acolytes around him, all these hippy girlies... he looks like a retired footballer in a leather jerkin and he's even more of a know-all than me and that's saying something

Wrapping-up a Room

Just before Christmas a sad thing happened to our friend, so that sad thing also happened to the rest of us – but a bit less.

We have been trying to make things better for her. Part of that involves a Big Clear Out in her home  - one room in particular, I got a call for help to redecorate this red red room:

I bought some rolls of brown wrapping paper to paper the walls with I think it’ll look great in there

Ok do you need anything – wallpaper paste?

No I’ve got loads of glue sticks.

We crayoned the glue sticks over the walls and stuck on the stripey brown paper it was like wrapping a parcel from the inside.

and when I looked at what we were doing I thought this does look great, it looks a bit like leather – vegetarian leather. 

Working silently for the first hour then my friend said

These glue sticks are really excellent - last time I used honey which wasn’t nearly as successful.

Brown bag sofa from here

My New Minimalism

I’ve been a bit stressed lately...

Normally I bake my way out of trouble but lately I've needed to get a bit more physical; I recently spent a happy weekend (I think it was happy) pulling up the nasty carpet in the living room and tearing off wallpaper, beating the room into submission until it was reduced to a bare shell.

When the thrill of that destruction had ebbed I turned my attention to the kitchen. The toy oven that never baked evenly and won’t fit a proper roast dinner, that and the leaky fridge were both hurled outside. Great lumps of wall cupboard that were stuck up on the walls taking up valuable air space, they came off ... so did the mimsy peach-coloured tiles.

All done, the next thing I needed was cake.

I now spend a lot of time looking at the space where the oven was.

PS: I've just reread one of my old posts, clearly home chaos is a recurring theme in my life (and that of my friends)

And Now For Something Shiny

Christmas is one of the many things that I refuse to acknowledge the existence of - for as long as possible - then somewhere around the 24th of December, my inner Trash Queen smashes through the carapace of my outer Grinch and I go into a frenzy of strewing holly and ivy around on random ledges as a prelude to the rearrangement of my collection of shiny stuff.

At some point in the new year the vegetation rots and I remove it but the shiny things remain until either the dust conceals the shininess* or I'm in a mood to move them around a bit.

Hence, as we approach Good Friday, I am typing this post next to the fairy light net that I installed on 24th December 2002, suspended among the lights are the jewelled Joy and Happiness Angels and a bloody-faced felt wolf in reindeer's clothing that were made by Ange last December.

I'm not the only one to do this obviously; along the Portobello Road is a shop called The Last Place On Earth. Last December I took photos of the owner sticking boxfuls of old gift ribbon bows around his frontage, I thought this was just for Christmas - but no, yesterday morning I passed the shop and saw that now the entire shop front is covered in bows and he has expansion plans up to the next floor!



*the shiny things are then banished to a box - I believe that the dust will drop off after a few years and I will bring them back out and rehang them.


I left the Pop Flat this morning and had a farewell breakfast with Half a Pop Group and The Child. The Child started scratching her head energetically, her mother's face looked horror-stricken, I said

Oh dear what does an itchy head mean?

The Child was triumphant

Nits and I've got curly ones!

Surprise Holiday

19th April
The journey door to door France to UK takes 16 hours. On Thursday at 5am The Director slammed the car boot shut ready to start the drive.

Then it dawned on me that we weren’t supposed to be leaving until the following day. Builders have been busy in our house and we’d agreed that they could destroy the place until Friday tea time, then it all had to be cleaned up. After a lot of tutting and eye-rolling we decided to set off anyway and stop somewhere en route - a surprise holiday.

I did a quick internet search and found an interesting-sounding place to stay that night, nearly all the B&B’s in France are run by British citizens, this one had a Russian proprietress (novelty value) and was in a rural area we were unfamiliar with.

Svetlana is as extraordinary as her house which is a combination of royal hunting lodge and the sort of sweetie-trap that Hansel and Gretel wandered into, our bedroom ceiling all pointy wooden slopes, the walls lined with deep-coloured, ornate fabric. Throughout the house there is curly-legged antique furniture and lots of gilt, in the salon a shiny grand piano. An astonishing dinner (for dessert: hot strawberries in port) was cooked and served by Svetlana who modelled a full-length, shiny turquoise evening dress. over the course of the evening we listened to her life story; she’d been a concert pianist but with the arrival of her children she’d become a music teacher at a school in an area with a lot of social problems, apparently the teachers there were expected to act as a sort of über-social worker, she’d visit the children in their homes and they stayed with her when their parents were ill or in prison.

She met her English husband in Russia and he convinced her to go to England with him for a 'better life’. In the UK she worked as a shop assistant at WH Smiths, newsagents, an isolated and friendless existence with scratchy teenage children but she persisted, got promoted and a few years ago, children now away working, she exchanged her Surrey semi for the gingerbread house.

DIY Decorations

19th December
My seasonal decorations have been fashioned out of stuff that I’ve found around the place so there’s a lot of pine cones and ivy going on. I’ve made a terrific garland using a coil of rusty barbed wire. It is heavy and, having attached it to the light over the front door, I now realise that there is something quite menacing about it, and I suppose it could actually be a bit dangerous.

Cat Update:
Cats are now much more confident here, or they were until I picked up The Director from the airport last night. They pay me scant attention but they’re fun to watch. Twice now I’ve seen Julie trying to sneak off with a limp rodent, Kevin always spots her and steals it. I’m identifying their catches by the remains which includes a dormouse tail and quite a bit of a vole.