April Fool’s Day: Moving into The Shed

I always find New Year’s Eve a bit hard to cope with. It’s as if there is an enormous, invisible clock, ticking away above my head, reminding me that my time is nearly up.
But what does that mean? What am I supposed to do in response to that feeling? The Devil on my shoulder might say that I should make amends for all of the dying year’s misdemeanors in however many minutes I have left. But even I, peculiar as I am, know that is just a load of old superstitious rubbish.
When the year is on its way out, I suddenly get a bit attached to it. I want to savour it in the moment – to experience and remember it. To “take stock”.

Time just marches on – there’s no amount of taking stock that can slow it down. It’s the way things should be – quite normal, and to be expected. But however hard I try, I find it difficult to let go of things, and this weekend, we are saying goodbye to our life as we know it, and moving forward into a new phase, never to return.

Since we discovered the Funny Little Bungalow in May 2014, I have held it with affection in my heart. It has a special feeling about it. It’s light and sunny. It has been loved. Many people have suggested, given the nature of the renovations Big Seymour is undertaking, that we should just knock the whole thing down and start again.
Certainly, seeing him struggle with his “plate levels” at the weekend, I was inclined to agree with them. But it would seem almost criminal to destroy it entirely.

I am a little worried that, once the structure starts to change, the essence that is the Funny Little Bungalow will go. Will it feel similar, or will the old version be just a memory?

The Funny Little Bungalow is certainly having its own say in things. It has sent us several messages over the last few months, telling us to hurry up – that it can’t hold out in this state much longer. Things have started to go wrong, and the destruction has taken its toll. On Thursday night, just as Big Seymour had got out of the bath and was ready to retire to bed, he found himself in the loft in amongst all the cobwebs, searching for a reason why, when he touched the bathroom radiator, it gave him a shock like an electric fence. He made me test it, just to see if it was only him with magic conducting properties. Nope – the radiator was live.
And late last night, when the Four Little Seymours had finally gone to bed after their school disco extravaganza, we heard a crash in the toilet. I went to investigate, suspecting that a child had sneaked out of bed, only to find a great hole in the wall above the cistern. A vent had popped out, and landed on the floor in a cloud of plaster.
Luckily, the old house doesn’t have to hang on much longer. As of tonight, it can relax. No longer will it need to bear the burden of trying to shelter us as we chip away at its walls. For today, we are moving out.

There’s a lot to do. I don’t really know where to start. Big Seymour is out, trying to hunt down a solution to the problem of No Internet in the Shed. And I am surrounded by stuff that somehow needs to be organised, packed and transported out to safety.
Tomorrow, apparently, the ceilings are coming down. So I really need to get cracking…
I think I’ll have a cup of tea first.