CURTAIN CALL 

We live in an Edwardian semi. It is lovely but draughty. Over the years we have blocked up fireplaces, insulated the loft, hung thicker curtains and made or bought draught excluders (or giraffe excluders as they are known here following a toddler’s misunderstanding of what I once said). 

Despite all this we often felt as though we sitting in a howling gale when the wind was blowing in a certain direction. And so it came to pass that I finally agreed with the OH that the windows in the front of the house should be replaced by ones that looked similar but were double-glazed. 

The upstairs ones were finished in the autumn. The OH decided that the wooden sills that were still in place needed ‘making good.’ Then he decided that, while he had his painting and decorating hat on, he would also redecorate my study. As readers of this blog may already know, he likes a project. It keeps him busy. 

One wall of the room was covered in bookshelves containing hundreds of books. Half of another wall had shelves where I kept my box files – tax stuff, accounts, birth certificates and so on. I wondered whether it was necessary to paint areas that were hidden by books and files but he was determined to ‘do the job properly’.

It took quite a while to clear the room and boxes (filled with books, files, photos and so on) started to take over the landing and other rooms upstairs. Work began but came to a stop over Christmas. 

After the festivities work eventually resumed. I tentatively asked when it would be finished. Friday, I was told. I am long enough in the tooth to take any tradesman’s estimate of a finishing date with a pinch of salt. I guessed the middle of the following week. 

So here we are. I am typing this on my computer which has been set up in the dining room. I have been allowed to unpack most of the boxes of books but I cannot yet access my box files. Meanwhile the master craftsman is wrestling with curtain rails and has yet to put back the door he removed to sand down because it stuck on the newly laid carpet. 

And I am trying to stick to my New Year resolutions. Be kinder. Be patient. Only now I have to help put back the curtains …

 

Looking for Mrs Tiggywinkle

When I was little, the Tale of Mrs Tiggywinkle was one of my favourite Beatrix Potter books.  I didn’t care much for Pigling Bland or Jeremy Fisher but the prickly little washerwoman with a kind heart appealed to me. I have never, however,  at any age, found much to like about laundry.

I remember having to wash so much by hand in the days before twin tubs and tumble dryers. But worse than the washing was the ironing. Now I know that some people enjoy the process of unwrinkling wrinkles, smoothing out collars and cuffs, pressing in pleats. Not me. Even if I try ironing while listening to the radio, it is a chore I just want to rush through as fast as possible so that I can go and do something more interesting. 

I also associate laundry with Women’s Lib – so much so that washing and ironing have sometimes been the Scylla and Charybdis of our marriage.   In fact I still remember my pique and disbelief when, during my first maternity leave, my other half asked me to iron his shirts on the grounds that I was at home and he was at work. 

Although I occasionally complied rather resentfully, as soon as I was back spending my days doing a job for which I was paid we reverted to the previous arrangement whereby I ironed my clothes and he ironed his. 

As the years went by the family expanded. By this time we were both earning more and we agreed we would spend some of the extra income on a laundry service. Once a week a man came round and collected the shirts and dresses and tablecloths and whatever else was too creased to be used again without being ironed.  

I failed to persuade the other half that the newfangled non-iron shirts were a godsend - although I bought no other kind for the children’s school uniform ever again. And I mostly stopped buying myself anything that couldn’t be machine-washed, tumble-dried, hung up and put straight away. 

Time passed.  The ironing man retired. We retired. True, there are fewer cotton shirts to be ironed now. But the other half now mostly wears cotton tops of the kind that can’t go in the tumble drier because they shrink.  I wash them, and let dry them on hangers in the utility room. Sometimes he washes them and does the same. So far so fair.  But they still need ironing. 

Anyone know where I can find Mrs Tiggywinkle? 

New Year, old me

 So, as young people start every sentence, my resolutions are:

Be kinder

Be more patient

Be more active

Be generally sunnier (although this is hard when one’s feet are freezing because the OH has turned the heating off again)

No doubt I will have broken all of these before the fireworks and fizz are finished.

It's summertime - and the living's far from easy

The advent of summer means different things to different people. Trips to the seaside. Family holidays. A gentle spot of gardening and then relaxing with a crossword over a cup of tea in the garden. 

When he was gainfully employed, the husband used to work most of the summer, leaving me to arrange activities for boisterous children and, later, bored teens. 

Now that the offspring have children of their own and the husband has retired, one might expect us to take the opportunity to make the most of warmer weather together. But no. Nowadays the end of the football season heralds only one thing: a project. 

One summer he decided to repaint the entire hallway, up and down stairs, including the bannisters. The process started with removing wallpaper and sanding down paintwork – it went on for days and by the end, despite my keeping as many doors closed as possible, every room in the house was covered in a fine layer of dust. 

The next stage – the application of the paint itself – was equally protracted. The final straw was when he blue he had chosen for the bannisters turned out to be less of an Oxford blue than he (or I) had anticipated but I pretended not to notice. By that time I just wanted my house and my sanity back. 

This year the project is easier to live with. It involves the garden. 

We have a smallish London garden, with steps leading down from a patio to a rectangle of scruffy lawn and another bit of hard standing at the bottom. 

Almost 20 years ago we foolishly planted Leylandii here to screen the block of flats behind us. We also had a shed there and a section of decking to each side.  Because the garden is on a slight slope, the decking on the right was raised and nicknamed the bandstand. 

We originally put a table and chairs on it because it caught the evening sun but as no-one could ever be bothered to take their G and T down there, preferring to sit on the patio by the French windows, we took the chairs away.

Years passed, the Leylandii grew … and grew … until I insisted they had to come down as they were taking up too much space and cutting off too much light. 

Then the shed started to lean ominously to one side and the decking on the left side started to rot. It got so bad that I banned the grandchildren from the bottom of the garden and refused to enter the shed myself in case the whole thing came down on top of me. 

Finally, this year, the husband agreed something had to be done. I was all for getting in a garden firm to do the work. The fence round the garden also needed replacing and the husband had already promised not to attempt this singlehandedly. I argued that the men who were going to do the fencing could also put up a shed and some new decking. In fact, I said, wistfully, it would be nice if we dished the decking and had some nice paving slabs instead. 

My words fell on deaf ears. And so it came to pass that my husband and his eldest son made many trips to the dump. The fencers came and put up the fence. Then – despite the instructions being written in gobbledygook instead of English, the husband and his son erected something the husband insists isn’t a shed but a summerhouse. 

He then proceeded to paint it in two different shade of green to match the paint he had used on the new fence. 

All this took some time and, despite the trips to the dump, the garden still seemed to be full of old fence panels, bits of old decking and even bits of the old shed.

It slowly dawned on me that a key part of the project was to re-use (re-cycle he says, proudly) this wood for new decking. There has been much sawing and hammering. At one point (in order to remove the Leylandii roots) there was even the purchase of a chain saw. So far there have been no trips to A and E. But we are now well into the third month and there seems to be no end in sight. 

The grandchildren are still banned from the bottom of the garden and have taken to calling the summerhouse a summershed – which seems pretty apt to me.   

I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that it all gets finished – even if summer’s over by then.     

Sand Wars

I SEE the OH putting on his shoes. We are expecting the son and his family to arrive for lunch at any minute.

“Are you going out?” I ask.

He explains that he is going to move the sandpit from the patio to the lawn and fill it up with the two big heavy bags of play sand he bought yesterday.

"Why?" I wonder. 
I say: “If it stays there all summer it will leave a big bare patch on your lawn.“

(He has spent a long time scarifying the moss with a machine he found in my late uncle’s shed when we were clearing his bungalow prior to its sale. The moss may be scared out of its wits but the baby’s tears shows no signs of surrender.)

“If they fall out they will hurt themselves,” he says, referring to the toddler and crawler. “Or scrape their knees on the patio.”

“And. “ he adds with the air of someone who is always right, “we've always had the sandpit on the grass.”

I bite my tongue. In the days when our own offspring were building sandcastles of their own, their sandpit was on the patio. He was mostly at work. Not much involved with toddler play.

Since we have had grandchildren, their sandpit has always been at the bottom of the garden on the decking - only we can't have it there any more as the decking is rotten and he hasn’t started his garden project yet.

He obviously senses that I disagree with him although I say not a word.

“It was on the lawn last year,” he insists.

“Yes,” I concede. “When we bought the new tortoise one because the lid of the boat one had broken and the sand was disgusting and full of creepy crawlies we put it on the lawn. But we only put a little bit of sand in so it was easy to move around.”

“Why do you always have to have an argument?” he says, slamming the kitchen door as he exits.

Later I look out of the window and see the sandpit. On the lawn.

Just don't ask me to help move it, I think.

I'm a little teapot

GRANNY duties are lovely but heaving a two-stone toddler in and out of a car seat has made me think that I need to do a little bit more to stay strong and supple than occasionally walking home from the supermarket with a bag-for-life full of groceries. But what?

I did join a gym once, I even had a personal trainer. Suffice it to say that I felt like a fish out of water in the weights room and when the OH (who had been scathing about the whole project) said he had noticed no improvement in my fitness or my figure I hung up my trainers with a sigh of relief.

On the other hand, I had fond memories of the QiGong classes I’d taken, back in the mists of time, and although a trawl of the internet failed to locate any local classes it did throw up a beginner’s Tai Chi class.

When I told the OH I was going he insisted he wanted to join me. “It will be good to do something together,” he said.

The class was held in the early afternoon in a local church hall.  Parking nearby was impossible and it was too far to walk so we went by bus, a mode of transport the OH does not enjoy.

Suffice it to say that we were not the oldest in the group by a long chalk. Most of the attendees were female and the instructor said that when it came to the movements we could hold on to the back of a chair if we needed to.

I sensed, at that point, that this was not what the OH had in mind.  So I was not surprised when, the following day, he announced he had found another Tai Chi class that he thought we should try.

My main objection was that it was held on a Monday evening: in my experience it’s all very well signing up to evening classes when the days are getting longer and warmer – but enthusiasm tends to wane as the nights close in and the weather turns inclement.

The OH was not to be deterred.  He showed me the website.  It said:

‘QiGong is a practice that has its focus on cultivating, circulating and harmonizing Qi. The idea is to first balance the body itself as a whole, and then balance the body within the backdrop of one’s environment.

‘Tai Chi, although related, is fundamentally a martial art. Some forms of QiGong do promote physical characteristics useful for martial arts, but in comparison, QiGong lacks the attack and defense principles contained in the Tai Chi postures.’

I could see that he was channelling his inner Bruce Lee.

Six weeks later he is still enthusiastic. I suspect it helps that the class is a mix of men and women, of young and not so young – and that beginners are taught alongside the more experienced. There are no chairs.

I made the mistake of wearing a turquoise T-shirt the first week: everyone else wore black. I also have a tendency to giggle at the names of some of the movements – such as parting the horse’s mane. (To me, it’s ‘I’m a little teapot’.)

And yes, the instructor does talk about it being a martial art.

To be honest, I hate it. It reminds me of the holiday I once had in Corfu when I failed to master the Kalamatiano – saying oops more often than opa!

But there’s no escape. I have no desire to live in a House of Flying Daggers.  

Bang go my resolutions

If anyone has been wondering why I have been silent so far this year, I can reveal that the only one of my New Year resolutions to last until now has been the one about being less critical of others.

That is just about to go out of the window, too.

So far this week the husband has been up to a succession of things that would have tried the patience of a saint.

I will draw a veil over the brief trip to Spain, when we didn't take maps (I've got maps on my phone, he said) and then ended up going back to Barcelona airport twice, twice!, because we missed the right turning for the motorway. 

But since we have been back he has insisted on catching up on all the tv programmes he missed with the sub titles on and the sound still up so loud you can hear the dialogue word for word upstairs.

He has also disregarded all medical advice about pacing himself, spent more than three hours in the garden (where the grass had not been cut since last autumn), and is now in so much pain with his neck that he can't sleep and is like a bear with a sore head.

Meanwhile, we have invited old friends for supper tonight. We discussed what to give them and agreed on a casserole and a crumble. Simple family fare. 

I assumed we would eat informally at the kitchen table - I was prepared to remove what another friend calls the Siege Perilous (the clip on baby seat) and the zoo animal tablecloth much loved by grandchildren, but no. 

The lord and master has decreed that we will eat in the dining room. Moreover, he instructs me to put out soup spoons as, alongside his carbonade de boeuf, he will now be making a potage of some sort (he has come back from Sainsburys with celeriac, so that would be my first guess). 

He also wants side plates for bread. He has bought cheese and biscuits. 

It will be a veritable feast.

Perhaps I read too many Phillipa Gregory novels when we were away, but it feels as though he is turning into Henry VIII.