There is an eerie sense of foreboding hanging over the Funny Little Bungalow at the moment. Spring is (thankfully) in the air, and the mud is drying up, but the house has never really looked worse.
This feeling has been lurking for a while now. The old dwelling seems to know that it’s about to be semi-demolished, and parts of it are slowly dying, one by one.
The central heating controller, the oven, the toaster, the kitchen light have all valiantly hung on until now, but are bowing out gracefully. It’s as if they belong to this time, this set-up. The new version of the house is not something that they feel they can be a part of.
Meanwhile, the Four Little Seymours continue on, oblivious to the upheaval ahead. They know the build is happening slowly around them, but I am not sure they have entirely grasped the notion that we are actually going to be living in The Shed.
If I’m honest, neither have I.
I suppose I should be packing – there have been several offers of help from lovely friends who have suggested I box things up. But, as is my usual problem, I just can’t seem to get going. Where do I start? If I pack stuff, I’m bound to need it unpacked. What can we leave in-situ? What can we dump and/or burn?
Tidying has pretty much ceased. I still make the beds and do the laundry and try to make sure that the floors are vaguely clear, but anything more than that would be tantamount to washing up the White Star Line crockery on the evening of the 14th April 1912. What’s the point?
Pride! I hear you cry. But I hate waste of any sort, and my skirting boards are about to be destroyed, so wiping them would certainly use up time I’d rather spend re-planting our rescued Christmas trees, or bombarding my favourite author with fan mail.
I know that I am letting the housework slide, and I have made my peace with that. But there are other things that I seem to be failing at, too. More important things, concerning the Four Little Seymours…
It was parents’ evening the other week. I always look forward to that. Talking about one’s children is something we parents are rather good at. Mini Seymour is making progress, and her phonics are very slowly creeping into her consciousness. But she can’t recognise the number three (amongst others). Her number knowledge isn’t great.
How have I missed that?
I had a call from the deputy head teacher a few days ago to tell me that she’d had to speak to Boy Seymour about his obsession with Boob Art.
Mortifying.
Little Seymour Number Two needed to dash to the doctor’s on Tuesday with hurting ears, and a suspected ear infection.
As for Number One, well…on Wednesday, we had a bit of an epic adventure courtesy of my first-born person.
She had dance club after school. We were picking her up from the bus stop, when I looked on my phone to see where she was – modern technology never ceases to amaze me.
My heart was in my mouth a little when I saw that she appeared to be located in some deserted junk yard, near an old cement works, a couple of miles south of anywhere she would have to have been on that day. Crikey! I thought. What the heck is she doing there?
I didn’t know what to do. I rang her, but there was no answer. I started to sweat. I told the other Three Little Seymours to stop talking so that I could think. But thinking is torture when one has an imagination like mine. This was not good…
Shortly afterwards, a bus turned up, and I prayed that Little Seymour Number One would get off it. Thank the lord! She did.
But, oh! Her face.
Now, as much as I would like to, I have not gone to the illegal lengths of micro-chipping my children. It’s a programme I would heartily endorse, should the NHS decide to trial it. But for some reason, this is considered a human rights issue, isn’t it? Anyway, it transpires that it was not in fact Little Seymour Number One who was in the scrappy abandoned cement works yard, but her phone.
Once I had thanked God and/or my Lucky Stars and/or Fate that my girl was safe, I was then able to turn my attention to the phone. “Where’s your phone?” I asked her. She melted into tears and all my worried tension came out. Phrases like “You’ve only had it for three months!” and “How could you lose it?” all galloped out of my mouth. We sent an apologetic text to the lady who we were supposed to be having tea with, and off we went, back in the direction the bus had just come from, hunting the lost phone.
It felt a bit like a futile exercise. An abandoned phone can be seen as fair game for pilferers. It’s not a bad one, albeit deceptively disguised as a brick whilst wearing a thick, turquoise and orange rubber case. But it would be expensive to replace, and I’d still have to pay the bill. So we had to try. We were “striking whilst the iron was hot”, as the Little Lost Phone beeped its SOS message at us through the Find My Friends app on my own device.
It was a glorious, sunny evening as Little Seymour Number One sat shamefaced in the passenger seat, keeping her eyes peeled on the flashing icon that was her lost phone. But all I could think about was, what on Earth was I going to do when I got to the dodgy, deserted old yard with a car full of kids and only an app to go on? I was winging it, for sure, and trying to be brave.
As we neared the location, Little Seymour Number One spotted one of her school coaches heading that way, so we followed that coach as it turned off the main road onto a side lane – an unofficial winding track that was definitely not residential. Soon, carcasses of buses and vans decorated the area as the path widened out, and we came across hangars, sheds and a plethora of scrapped vehicles. I stopped Minty, my little blue car in the middle of the yard and asked the driver of the coach in front where the school buses might be. He pointed further down, so deeper into the yard we went.
An old chap with a grumpy face got out of a nearby vehicle, and I put on my best smile and apologised profusely for disturbing him, whilst wishing I’d washed and brushed my hair that morning (such things can make all the difference, I’m told.) But his face softened as he nodded and waddled off cheerfully towards an old shipping container, leaving me unsure whether he’d heard me or not.
I ventured in the same direction just as a rather nice-looking man in dungarees came my way, smiling and wielding a blow torch in a non-threatening manner.
And then, my faith in human nature was further restored, when a very charming bus driver came out of the container waving the lurid turquoise and ornage phone, smiling and explaining how he was glad we’d come, as he hates to be responsible for things as expensive as pupils’lost phones. I wanted to hug this chap – not really because of the phone, but because in a place I had perhaps expected to be seen off with shouts and a pack of alsations, I was left reassured that decent people appear to be driving my daughter’s buses.
I grovelled my thanks, made Little Seymour Number One do the same and we said our goodbyes, and as I drove away, Blow-Torch Man seemed to be happily cremating an old PC hard drive for some after-work fun at the depot.
I felt like I had made new friends.
That was last week, and the weekend just gone has seen the renovations on the Funny Little Bungalow ramp up a notch. Big Seymour knocked two ginormous holes in the side of the house, added lintels and then bricked as much as he could back up again.
I’ve had fleeting moments of desperation whilst trying to hod-carry, make tea, peel potatoes and periodically pin-point the whereabouts of the Four Little Seymours and The Kid Next Door all at once. I’ve done some washing, some planting, some muck-spreading and much child-ferrying. We went to a jumble sale (I know! I know!), and the Four Little Seymours have started to make their nests in The Shed, in the usual style of arguing about who will sleep where and who gets the least manky mattress.
None of my jobs are finished.
On Saturday evening, I discovered Facebook live video streaming, which seemed to entertain a few people, given that my kitchen was almost entirely covered in rubble at the time, and after a few glasses of wine, I was able to find the whole situation hilarious, even if I actually couldn’t find anything else under the dust.
By the end of the weekend, I was simply glad that we’d all survived. Big Seymour seemed pleased with what he achieved, and the rain held off whilst there were massive holes in the roof. The house is almost back to its own unique state of normal, after Grandma E ran round with a hoover, furiously tidying things as she went.
But one thing’s for sure – I need to muster up some energy for the next stage, if this weekend is anything to go by, so I shall dose myself up with vitamins and an iron will.
Incidentally, I wonder if Berocca still works if it has been contaminated by brick dust?
0 Comments