Happy Day

I can’t cut, measure or draw straight and I avoid touching power tools. When I need to solve a problem I do it within the limits of my skills, concentrating on problems that can be solved with wool, paint or cardboard or a nice warm bath.

The view into my kitchen is too public. If I can just work out how to support the honeysuckle outside the window and make it grow more vertical I could burn cabbage in privacy.

I pulled out all my pieces of wood and screws and thought of things that I could make that would support a trellis plus heavy plant. I knew this would take at least all weekend.

My neighbour, alerted by the high pitched noises coming from my head, came over and suggested the sort of simple elegant scheme that only a man with a pneumatic drill would think of. 

And then he got out his pneumatic drill and made the thing 

And I have a whole weekend left to admire it

Flop House Blues

 Image Matthias Haker

Today was a fixing bonanza; the chimney man arrived unexpectedly* to admire my flue and then another man arrived to pull pieces of rubber band out of my dishwasher and make it work again.  Chimney Man and I peered at the dripping leak beneath the bathroom and decided that it did really look more like broken plumbing than broken weather, I still can't get a plumber to visit.

Having lodgers seems to be my main motivation for keeping the house functioning, if it was just me on my own I’d probably let everything grind to a halt and wear away until I was just living in a tent in a pile of rubble.

Somehow I’ve extrapolated this into the idea that I should run a hotel or at least a boarding house of ill-repute.  I see myself as a harsh concierge in bright lipstick and a bouffant hairdo, pasting up lists concerning rules of conduct. I’d hand out weekly allowances of soap and hard lavatory paper and make judgements about the resident’s visitors to whoever was drinking Cosmopolitans with me in the public lounge.

This may also be the only way that I’ll be allowed to have a dog - it will be a poodle.

I have a New York friend who took me to the Chelsea Hotel once,  she had delivered drugs there to certain residents in the infamous days. At the time my friend lived in the same apartment block as Madonna who was just becoming known and was right from the beginning notoriously rude. Madonna was getting sent more flowers than she had vases to accommodate - my friend loaned her vases - and never got them back.

* I emailed him weeks ago and had given up hope.