Don’t you just love it when people with far less to do than you keep telling you how busy they are? As though you aren’t, and are therefore a lesser being?
For a long time when we first made the move, I had a great excuse to sound occupied: everything took four times longer than it should. Take, for example, the night that I decided a large gin was the only answer – and then remembered that to reach the essential ice I had to don the wellies, coat and fleece, find a torch, unlock the front door and walk down the side of the house through the mud, negotiate my way across the yard around the many piles of building materials, the skip and the rubble-laden trailer, heave open the garage door, climb over the mower and get to the freezer. And then get back again. I think that’s when the Baileys discovered it’s new resting place just behind my head as I sat in the relative warmth of the sitting room/playroom (which used to be the dining room, with its quaint checked wallpaper ceiling) squinting at the telly through the narrow slit in my balaclava.
Although I have to admit that the state of domestic bliss in those days was a wonderful excuse to actually do nothing at all much. Pot Noodles don’t deserve their bad press, and it’s surprising how quickly even very small babies get used to ready meals. Only once did Eeyore suggest a dinner party, and when we had both recovered from the scene of appalling violence that ensued, he admitted that perhaps he had been a little premature and ambitious. I found that with a little application, a quick coffee after the morning drop-off could be stretched to nearly lunch time – although as the invitations to partake in friends’ kitchens began to dry up, Jabba and I began to take our conviviality elsewhere. Many were the strangers on park benches we accosted in those days. There genuinely wasn’t any point in doing more the bare minimum of cleaning – and it’s surprising how very bare I managed to make that minimum be. And while even I insisted on clean school uniform, it was amazing how seldom I personally needed to change my clothes, so long as I occasionally varied the very top layer of ubiquitous squeaky nylon fleece. At No1’s scarily trendy London school, my days were fraught with fashion terrors: utterly unable to keep up with matching Prada outfits to handbags, I endured degrees of humiliation you can probably only imagine until I grew up and begin to derive a perverse pleasure from dressing much as I do now. Don’t believe what they say: life is a rehearsal.
Having said which, I seem to remember spending ages moving the washing around. To do which I had to negotiate three uncarpeted precipitous stairs in the dark (of course: no lights), climb through the scaffolding that held up most of the back of the first floor for a year or so, unload the machine and bring it downstairs through two stairgates to our friend’s spare (spare?) tumble dryer in the hall. With no hot radiators, snow outside quite often and our dryer – like BOTH our hoovers – too full of dust to be capable of anything at all, we were yet again dependent on the largesse of our new friends who supplied tea, sympathy, warmth and ultimately their precious white goods until they must have rued the day we crash landed in their lives. All the while trying to avoid the razor sharp carpet gripper with my bare feet – shoes were naturally out of the question much of the time, as clacking on bare boards was bound to wake the Little Darlings and carpets were a thing of both the past and the future.
